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A New Tool to Help Mathematicians Pack
...in 8-D and a Leech lattice in 24-D. These arrangements are not only densest; they are “universally” optimal. Perhaps for this reason, the structures appear broadly throughout mathematics and physics....
Three Puzzles Inspired by Ramanujan
...lives, and is finding applications in computer science, string theory, and the mathematical basis of black hole physics. A monthly puzzle celebrating the sudden insights and unexpected twists of scientific...
In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge
...on a computer, their suspicions were confirmed: The interaction between drivers caused the spacing between departures to exhibit a distinctive pattern previously observed in quantum physics experiments. “I was thinking...
New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start
...of life’s handedness in the prebiotic worlds of physics and chemistry, not biology. Many molecules come in mirror-image forms, known as left-handed and right-handed. A chemical process will create both...
New Insights Into How Zika Harms the Brain
...researchers feel is reasonable. Some are posting their work to preprint servers, a practice that, while common in fields like physics, has never taken off in biology. Preprint papers, like...
A Proof That Some Spaces Can’t Be Cut
...dissertation adviser at Harvard, and Tomasz Mrowka, a topologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, combined equations that originated in quantum physics with Floer homology to construct a powerful invariant...
How Strange Twists in DNA Orchestrate Life
...shape and flexibility. “These experiments are going to stimulate a lot of thinking and rethinking, especially in the physics community,” said Wilma Olson, a biophysical chemist at Rutgers University in...
A Timely Fix for a Grand Theory of Nature
...ideas in ecology like neutral theory may be like the ideal gas law, an equation from physics that describes the general properties of gases very well. To make predictions about...
For Persi Diaconis’ Next Magic Trick …
...smooshing will confer only inconsequentially tiny increments of additional randomness. The cutoff phenomenon, which occurs in a variety of situations in math and physics, owes its discovery to an earlier...