Math

In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the spacetime outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six…

Once found, these inscrutable rules have helped particle physicists calculate scattering amplitudes at much higher levels of precision than they could achieve with the traditional approach. The restructuring also allowed Dixon and his…

The goal here is to trace out triangles on top of these lines such that the triangles satisfy two requirements: First, no two triangles share an edge. (Systems that fulfill this requirement are called Steiner triple systems.) And second,…

In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal—the highest honor for a mathematician—Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, and Kyiv, her hometown.Viazovska no…

as the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a well-known conjecture, establishing…

A conservative friend suggests banning all adjectives—eliminate identifiers entirely. “Conservative,” for example. Adjectives signal our opinion of a person, and sometimes that’s all. Relying on them exaggerates differences, shrink-wraps…