See how fractals forever changed math and science
Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to…
Category: Math stories
Stories about math and mathematicians.
Here’s why mathematicians are so interested in cake cutting
Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the…
How to build a big prime number
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves,…
Is It Actually Impossible to “Square the Circle?”
Geometry students are taught that squaring the circle — using a compass and straightedge to draw a square with the…
The New Math of Wrinkling
A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and…
How Mathematicians Cracked the Zodiac Killer’s Cipher
In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and…
Mathematicians Resurrect Hilbert’s 13th Problem
Success is rare in math. Just ask Benson Farb. “The hard part about math is that you’re failing 90% of the…
When Scientific American Made M. C. Escher Famous
Between 1957 and 1986 Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for this magazine, with a total of 297 installments.…
How Close Are Computers to Automating Mathematical Reasoning?
In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in…
Your Hyperbolic Mind
The human brain is both a marvel and a mystery of evolution: Packed into a volume about one-quarter that of…