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Can Information Rise From Randomness?
...in a recent Math Horizons article, I believe that our human love of solving puzzles is a reflection of the unique cognitive-emotional link that makes us the intelligent creatures we...
The Slippery Eel of Probability
In school, we are trained to think that math problems always have one correct answer. But this is not necessarily true for problems dealing with probability, if the method used...
The Connoisseur of Number Sequences
...with the Zentralblatt — the German equivalent of Math Reviews’ MathSciNet — about making it possible to search for formulas in the OEIS. Suppose you want the summation of xn...
Visions of Future Physics
...matter, and the exploration of new mathematical structures in gauge theory scattering amplitudes” — Arkani-Hamed, 43, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J., is widely...
A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation
...mathematical proof that the current best algorithm was “optimal” — in other words, that finding a more efficient way to compute edit distance was mathematically impossible. The Boston Globe celebrated...
A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction
...late 1970s, the Dutch mathematician Floris Takens was studying chaos theory, which had begun to emerge in the 1960s as scientists recognized that many of nature’s complex phenomena seem to...
Theorists Draw Closer to Perfect Coloring
...But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which “behave very nicely with respect to coloring,” said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor...
Be Still My Pulsating Sequence
Our Insights problem this month is based on a sequence of integers which comes from Neil Sloane, a mathematician who is arguably the world’s greatest authority on such sequences. Contributing...
Nature’s Critical Warning System
...have been studied mathematically — such as food webs that, unlike Peter Lake’s, are so chaotic that they do not exhibit critical transitions at all — the same signal might...