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“Things that are so far removed from our daily experience… are inherently...
That’s certainly true of numbers. And as the numbers grow, the cognitive challenges grow with them. (Indeed, by way of example: 1 million seconds, is roughly 11.5 days; 1 billion seconds is almost 32...
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“Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the...
As Simone de Rochefort explains, Patience– or as we tend to know it, solitaire— illustrates the way in which some of humanity’s oldest toys are our most complex… … last year, I got addicted to...
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“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain;...
As Gregory Barber explains, two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe… It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while some went cross-country skiing,...
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“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and...
Knots with 8 crossings From Kim (Scott) Morrison‘s and Dror Bar-Natan‘s, The Knot Atlas, “a complete user-editable knot atlas, in the wiki spirit of Wikipedia“– a marvelous example of a wide-spread...
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“The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a...
In order to bridge the yawning gulf between the humanities and the sciences, Gordon Gillespie suggests, we must turn to an unexpected field: mathematics… In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P...
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“In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value...
Matteo Wong talks with mathematician Terence Tao about the advent of AI in mathematical research and finds that Tao has some very big questions indeed… Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is...
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“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty”*…
Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing with a glorious memory… This cover from the July 1965 issue of Scientific American illustrates the “Four Bugs Problem” featured in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical...
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“Chance, too, which seems to rush along with slack reins, is bridled and...
And the history of our understanding of those laws is, as Tom Chivers explains (in an excerpt from his book, Everything is Predictable), both fascinating and illuminating… Traditionally, the story of...
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“If someone separated the art of counting and measuring and weighing from all...
Mathematics, Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg argue, was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry,...
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“Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage...
Jordana Cepelewicz on two new topographical results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes… The central objects of study in topology are spaces called...
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“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and...
6,144 colors in random order. (source: By grotos on Flickr; via O’Reilly Radar) … A French mathematician has just won the Abel Prize for his decades of work developing a set of tools now widely used...
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“A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts”*…
Andrew Granville at work Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is, on why objectivity is never quite within reach, and on the role that AI might play… … What is a mathematical...
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“To understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits”*…
Oscar Schwartz begs to differ. Here, excerpts from his provocative critique of TED Talks… Bill Gates wheels a hefty metal barrel out onto a stage. He carefully places it down and then faces the...
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“Life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of...
How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. And as Ben Brubaker explains, a string of recent results has...
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“A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass”*…
Holes. Caity Weaver wonders about them: What is a hole? A hole is a portion of something where something is not. Beyond that, holes are slippery. (As a concept — only some in reality.) Is a hole...
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“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it...
The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of...
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“Mathematics has not a foot to stand on which is not purely metaphysical”*…
Battle of Maida 1806, part of the the invasion and occupation of Naples by Napoleon’s French Empire (source) Lest we forget… A forgotten episode in French-occupied Naples in the years around 1800—just...
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“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder...
Lynn Hunt on Alexis de Tocqueville, who left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become Democracy in America… Alexis de Tocqueville was a study in...
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“Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one”*…
… or, as Sheon Han explains, maybe not… Imagine you had some useful knowledge — maybe a secret recipe, or the key to a cipher. Could you prove to a friend that you had that knowledge, without...
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“Advantage! What is advantage?”*…
Pradeep Mutalik unpacks the magic and math of how to win games when your opponent goes first… Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play....
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