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Hyperjumps Math Game
Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! Back in 1981, Cameron Gordon introduced a new way to relate two knots — mathematical constructs modeled after the knots that appear...
A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate
...emerging hypothesis points to a variation of the mechanism that produces so-called “Turing patterns.” In a 1952 paper, the British mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing proposed a mathematical mechanism for...
The New Math of Wrinkling
...be seen as the solution to a geometric problem. “It is a beautiful piece of mathematical analysis,” said Stefan Müller of the University of Bonn’s Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in...
Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
...third mathematician involved, Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians’ couches and subsisting on the...
Pentagon Tiling Proof Solves Century-Old Math Problem
A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane. One of the oldest problems in geometry asks which shapes...
Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics
An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics. Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people...
How Math (and Vaccines) Keep You Safe From the Flu
...be a matter of life or death. The mathematics underlying vaccinations and herd immunity is important, so tell a friend. Better yet, tell two. Download the “Math of Herd Immunity”...
How Nature Defies Math in Keeping Ecosystems Stable
Paradoxically, the abundance of tight interactions among living species usually leads to disasters in ecological models. New analyses hint at how nature seemingly defies the math. Behind the beautiful facade...
How Randomness Can Make Math Easier
...mathematics were easier, mathematicians might not need to resort to randomness. But most important mathematical questions are too hard for mathematicians to answer directly. “It’s something that may be obvious,...