Browsing Tag
Mathematicians
5 posts
Mathematicians Solve Long-Standing Coloring Problem
For years, 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 colored points are exactly one unit of distance apart? The question was first posed by Leo Moser, a Canadian mathematician
Mathematicians Protest Russia Hosting Major Conference
As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is “the largest and most significant conference on pure and…
Mathematicians Outwit a Hidden Number ‘Conspiracy’
Intuition tells mathematicians that adding 2 to a number should completely change its multiplicative structure—meaning there should be no correlation between whether a number is prime (a multiplicative property) and whether the number two units away is prime (an additive property). Number theorists have found no evidence to suggest that such a correlation exists, but…
Mathematicians Clear Hurdle in Quest to Decode Primes
number theoryBy Kevin HartnettJanuary 13, 2022Paul Nelson has solved the subconvexity problem, bringing mathematicians one step closer to understanding the Riemann hypothesis and the distribution of prime numbers.Mia Carnevale for Quanta MagazineIt’s been 162 years since Bernhard Riemann posed a seminal question about the distribution of prime numbers. Despite their best efforts, mathematicians have made…
Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy
A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building blocks, the prime numbers. In a paper posted last March, Harald Helfgott of the University of Göttingen in Germany and Maksym Radziwiłł of the California Institute of Technology presented…