Math stories - Stephen Ornes

Math long resisted a digital disruption. AI is poised to change that

artificial intelligence, Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

Modern formalization, supercharged by AI, could radically change the way people do mathematics Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point. There’s already an accepted proof that was finalized in 1998. That work […]

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$See how fractals forever changed math and science$

See how fractals forever changed math and science

Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to describe a family of rough, fragmented shapes that fall outside the boundaries of conventional geometry. Mathematicians had been describing these types of shapes since the late 19th century. But by giving them a name — derived from fractus,

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Here’s why mathematicians are so interested in cake cutting

Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the Harvard computer scientist has three children who among them have celebrated more than two dozen birthdays. He knows what it’s like to stand with a knife before a layered masterpiece, frosted with buttercream and chocolate

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How to build a big prime number

computer science, Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

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 exist. Producing one on command doesn’t seem as if it should be difficult. But it is. Constructing arbitrarily large prime

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Is It Actually Impossible to “Square the Circle?”

Math stories, Recent Work / Stephen Ornes

Geometry students are taught that squaring the circle — using a compass and straightedge to draw a square with the same area as a given circle — is impossible. But in February 2022, a trio of mathematicians who couldn’t resist an impossible challenge presented the closest solution yet for the problem. Squaring the circle has

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The New Math of Wrinkling

Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up for the audience to see, squeezed it for good measure, then spread it out again. “I get a wild mass of folds

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How Mathematicians Cracked the Zodiac Killer’s Cipher

Math stories, Recent Work / Stephen Ornes

In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and claimed to have murdered more. In November 1969, the Zodiac Killer sent a card to the San Francisco Chronicle containing a 340-character secret message that for more than 50 years went unsolved by detectives, cryptography experts, amateur

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Mathematicians Resurrect Hilbert’s 13th Problem

Features, Math stories / Stephen Ornes

Success is rare in math. Just ask Benson Farb. “The hard part about math is that you’re failing 90% of the time, and you have to be the kind of person who can fail 90% of the time,” Farb once said at a dinner party. When another guest, also a mathematician, expressed amazement that he succeeded

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When Scientific American Made M. C. Escher Famous

Math stories, Recent Work / Stephen Ornes

Between 1957 and 1986 Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for this magazine, with a total of 297 installments. During that time he became the world’s most prolific and best-known popularizer of recreational mathematics. His fans still revere him as a kind of sorcerer who conjured up an endless feast of puzzles, games and

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How Close Are Computers to Automating Mathematical Reasoning?

computer science, Features, Math stories, Tech / Stephen Ornes

In the 1970s, the late mathematician Paul Cohen, the only person to ever win a Fields Medal for work in mathematical logic, reportedly made a sweeping prediction that continues to excite and irritate mathematicians — that “at some unspecified future time, mathematicians would be replaced by computers.” Cohen, legendary for his daring methods in set theory, predicted

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