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The Symmetry That Makes Solving Math Equations Easy
...solves every equation of the form $latex ax^2+bx+c=0$. The formula is as useful as it is likely to appear in the dictionary under “math anxiety,” and a quick look shows...
Math Patterns That Go On Forever but Never Repeat
Math Patterns That Go On Forever but Never Repeat Simple math can help explain the complexities of the newly discovered aperiodic monotile. Have you ever admired how the slats of...
How Simple Math Moves the Needle
...do for you.) There’s a fun math problem here about how much space you need to turn your car around, and mathematicians have been working on an idealized version of...
Hyperjumps Math Game
Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! Back in 1981, Cameron Gordon introduced a new way to relate two knots — mathematical constructs modeled after the knots that appear...
Years After the Early Death of a Math Genius, Her Ideas Gain New Life
...whether she would go into music or math. In 2015, both mathematicians ended up visiting the University of California, Berkeley, for a semester. Mirzakhani’s daughter and Anantharaman’s son were close...
A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate
...emerging hypothesis points to a variation of the mechanism that produces so-called “Turing patterns.” In a 1952 paper, the British mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing proposed a mathematical mechanism for...
The New Math of Wrinkling
...be seen as the solution to a geometric problem. “It is a beautiful piece of mathematical analysis,” said Stefan Müller of the University of Bonn’s Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in...
Cash for Math: The Erdős Prizes Live On
...third mathematician involved, Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians’ couches and subsisting on the...
Pentagon Tiling Proof Solves Century-Old Math Problem
A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane. One of the oldest problems in geometry asks which shapes...