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Quanta Magazine: Construct a convex octagon with four right angles. It probably says a lot about me as a teacher that I assign problems like this. I watch as students try to arrange the right angles consecutively. When that doesn’t work,…
Quanta Magazine: On a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos arrived on the geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack’s doorstep in Philadelphia. Domokos carried with him his suitcases, a bad cold and a burning secret. The two men walked across…
Nature: When physicists first thought up quantum computers in the 1980s, they sounded like a nice theoretical idea, but one probably destined to remain on paper. Then in 1995, 25 years ago this month, applied mathematician Peter Shor published a…
New Scientist: We have found the best path to take between the stars. The travelling salesman problem, an infamous mathematical puzzle that seeks the shortest route between many locations while visiting each only once and returning to the first, has been…
Quanta Magazine: The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every other value that can be written as a ratio of positive or negative whole numbers. But they can still be hard to work with. The problem…
