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What a Math Party Game Tells Us About Graph Theory
Play this simple math game with your friends to gain insights into fundamental principles of graph theory. Now that pandemic restrictions are easing up, people are getting together again. But...
The Secrets of Zugzwang in Chess, Math and Pizzas
Learn the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first. Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them...
One Man’s Mission to Unveil Math’s Beauty
Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, discusses how to bring out the joy, creativity and beauty in math. Photo by Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine; Video by Emily...
The Math Behind Wordle Guesses
Wordle is a word game. But you can use math to optimize your chances of winning (without cheating). In the simple game of Wordle, players have to guess a secret...
Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally
...the mathematicians who proved it, as they expected the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture to be false for pentagons. It was another surprisingly powerful mathematical result that came from thinking locally to act...
Behold Modular Forms, the ‘Fifth Fundamental Operation’ of Math
Modular forms are one of the most beautiful and mysterious objects in mathematics. What are they? “There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said....
A Triplet Tree Forms One of the Most Beautiful Structures in Math
...an equation, it’s a kind of method,” said Oleg Karpenkov, a mathematician at the University of Liverpool. “These numbers are central, deep inside mathematics … structures like this one are...
The Math That Promises to Make the World Brighter
...(LEDs are already efficient, but they could be a lot more so). My latest story, “Mathematicians Tame Rogue Waves, Lighting Up Future of LEDs,” is about a mathematical discovery that...
New Earthquake Math Predicts How Destructive They’ll Be
The “pinball” model of a slipping fault line borrows from the mathematics of avalanches. When a fault slips, it unleashes a torrent of seismic waves, not all of them alike....