In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph — a ...

Researchers thought that they were five years away from solving a math riddle from the 1980's. In reality, and without knowing, they had nearly cracked the problem and had just given away much of the ...

A puzzle that has long flummoxed computers and the scientists who program them has suddenly become far more manageable. A new algorithm efficiently solves the graph isomorphism problem, computer ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

Let’s say you’re planning your next party and agonizing over the guest list. To whom should you send invitations? What combination of friends and strangers is the right mix? It turns out ...

Jacob Holm was flipping through proofs from an October 2019 research paper he and colleague Eva Rotenberg—an associate professor in the department of applied mathematics and computer science at the ...