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New Number Systems Seek Their Lost Primes
For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. Mathematicians are digging up the root...
A Puzzle of Clever Connections Nears a Happy End
The three young friends who devised the “happy ending” problem became some of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, but were never able to solve their own puzzle....
Yitang Zhang’s Santa Barbara Beach Walk
...of China’s top math students and completing his doctorate at Purdue University in Indiana, for seven years Zhang could not find work as a mathematician. At one point, he worked...
New Shapes Solve Infinite Pool-Table Problem
...related Abstractions post: Why Mathematicians Like to Classify Things “They are like these rare jewels,” said Curt McMullen, a mathematician at Harvard University and a co-author of the work along...
A Universal Law for the ‘Blood of the Earth’
...system, one that carried the “blood of the Earth.” Today, branching river networks still lure would-be explainers, many of whom hope to glimpse some underlying mathematical code responsible for etching...
Proof Finds That All Change Is a Mix of Order and Randomness
...at Northwestern University. It often happens in math that after a sweeping conjecture is proven false, mathematicians attempt a more modest version of the statement. In 1977 mathematician Jean-Paul Thouvenot...
How (Relatively) Simple Symmetries Underlie Our Expanding Universe
...events as before. It is in the language of these symmetries that relativity simplified our mathematical description of the universe. In fact, the math becomes even nicer when the expansion...
The Architect of Modern Algorithms
...a blank page. Liskov, who had studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to approach programming not as a technical problem, but as a mathematical...
Tadashi Tokieda’s Special Kind of Magic
The mathematician Tadashi Tokieda and host Steven Strogatz explore what we can learn about the world from simple “toys” with remarkable physical or mathematical properties. The mathematician Tadashi Tokieda loves...