You are looking for
Advanced search
The Fabulously Fair Feast
This month’s Insights puzzle arises out of a peculiar weekly bonding ritual of four fair-minded friends. Amar, Bob, Ching and Danica are math graduate students who share a house. Their...
Hope Rekindled for Perplexing Proof
...Mathematical Institute at Oxford in the most significant attempt thus far to make sense of what Mochizuki had done. Minhyong Kim, a mathematician at Oxford and one of the three...
How Strange Twists in DNA Orchestrate Life
...language of DNA topology that could direct a host of cellular processes. “It’s intriguing that DNA behaves this way, that topology matters in living organisms,” said Craig Benham, a mathematical...
Solution: ‘The Problem With Dancing Shapes’
...song, at least 17 triangles will be empty. For this problem there was a slight twist in the tail — the kind of twist that math teachers add in order...
Michael Atiyah’s Imaginative State of Mind
...first half of his career connecting mathematics to mathematics, and the second half connecting mathematics to physics. Atiyah is best known for the “index theorem,” devised in 1963 with Isadore...
Solution: A Hat Trick + 1 of Hat Puzzles
...the expected amount? The winning strategy here can be called the “checksum modulo-3” method. It uses two mathematical principles: the checksum (you add a bunch of numbers and take the...
Is Infinity Real?
Euclidean geometry has a way of turning mathematically inclined students into lifelong math lovers, and I was no exception. But a primitive assumption has always troubled me: The definition of...
Solution: ‘A Drunkard’s Walk in Manhattan’
...is the same process that underlies diffusion: the rate at which the sugar or sweetener spreads into your morning tea or coffee. The funny math book that I referred to...
The Strange Second Life of String Theory
...it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist. The mathematics that have come out...