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Do We Need a New Theory of Gravity?
...biggest questions in math and science today. In this episode, we ask physicist Claudia de Rham, what might gravity be hiding at a particle level? And how might this change...
How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero
...simple, math students and mathematicians alike continue to wrestle with it. Zero is the “eccentric uncle in the family of numbers,” Nieder said. To use zero in calculations, mathematicians had...
How Big Data Carried Graph Theory Into New Dimensions
Researchers are turning to the mathematics of higher-order interactions to better model the complex connections within their data. Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which...
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...