In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to […]
In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to […]
Imagine you visit a maze with some friends. You emerge from the exit shortly after going in, and wait around for hours before your friends emerge. Naturally, they ask about the path you took — […]
For decades, a simple question has haunted Máté Matolcsi, a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. How much of an infinite plane can you color in while making sure that no two […]
While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. In both the ocean and the […]
Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about […]
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number of them […]
The heart’s electrical system keeps all its muscle cells beating in sync. A hard whack to the chest at the wrong moment, however, can set up unruly waves of abnormal electrical excitation that are potentially […]
In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly 150-square-mile national […]
In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate it so […]
Most physicists expect that when we zoom in on the fabric of reality, the unintuitive weirdness of quantum mechanics persists down to the very smallest scales. But in those settings, quantum mechanics collides with classical […]
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