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How Math (and Vaccines) Keep You Safe From the Flu
Simple math shows how widespread vaccination can disrupt the exponential spread of disease and prevent epidemics. Let’s say you hear a juicy rumor that you just can’t keep to yourself....
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,...
Math Reveals the Secrets of Cells’ Feedback Circuitry
...is backed by a mathematical proof that no simpler answer exists — a good indication that natural feedback systems probably work the same way. Long before biologists figured out how...
Landmark Computer Science Proof Cascades Through Physics and Math
...how to mathematically model entanglement, and a related problem in pure mathematics called the Connes embedding conjecture. In the end, the results cascaded like dominoes. “The ideas all came from...
What Goes On in a Proton? Quark Math Still Conflicts With Experiments.
...their theory predicts and thus less able to interpret signs of new, unpredicted particles or effects. To understand what makes quarks and gluons such mathematical scofflaws, consider how much mathematical...
To Win This Numbers Game, Learn to Avoid Math Patterns
Sizing up patternless sets is hard, so mathematicians rely on simple bounds to help answer their questions. Here’s a simple number game to play on a rainy day, or while...
The Year in Math and Computer Science
Even as mathematicians and computer scientists proved big results in computational complexity, number theory and geometry, computers proved themselves increasingly indispensable in mathematics. For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was...
Pioneers Linking Math and Computer Science Win the Abel Prize
...teenager he earned three gold medals at the International Math Olympiad and also triumphed in a Hungarian game show that put math prodigies inside glass isolation booths and challenged them...