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Searching Symbols for the Rules of Change
...for clarity. When and how did you realize that you liked mathematics? Oh, I always liked math. I grew up with math in the house. It was always there, sort...
The Almost-Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem
...Manjul Bhargava, a mathematician at Princeton University. “It’s so counterintuitive to think that could fail for a bigger number system, but it sometimes does.” 19th-century mathematicians thought the “roots of...
Untangling Why Knots Are Important
...How many different kinds of knots are there? And why do mathematicians and scientists care about knots anyway? Turns out, there’s lots of real-world applications for this branch of math,...
What Can Jellyfish Teach Us About Fluid Dynamics?
...have to say, as a mathematician, I was always drawn to fluid dynamics because it’s so difficult. Some of the most difficult math problems that we have faced in the...
The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers
...me a math riddle. As hard as you want, but if I solve, I go.’” She usually went. Her dormant love of math finally awakened in college, when she began...
The Musical, Magical Number Theorist
...a remarkable mathematical intuition. “Teach me more math!” he would badger his mother, Mira Bhargava, a mathematics professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. When he was 3 years old...
A Traveler Who Finds Stability in the Natural World
...point,” he said. Figalli turned toward serious math in his third year of high school. A mathematician colleague of his father’s encouraged Figalli to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad,...
A Primordial Nucleus Behind the Elements of Life
...field theory employs a math trick sometimes used in high school calculus. In the same way that a mathematical function, such as a curve on a graph, can be approximated...
Is Nature Unnatural?
...“Particle physicists, especially string theorists, had this dream of predicting uniquely all the constants of nature,” Bousso explained. “Everything would just come out of math and pi and twos. And...