In mid-November of last year, David Smith, a retired print technician and an aficionado of jigsaw puzzles, fractals and road maps, was doing one of his favorite things: playing with shapes. Using a software package called the PolyForm Puzzle Solver, …
“For me, mathematics exists in the space between us,” Emmy Murphy wrote in accepting the 2020 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize. That space, for her, is a realm of art, perhaps even more than science. And like an artist, she …
As Bill Gates tells the story, Warren Buffett once challenged him to a game of dice. Each would select one of four dice belonging to Buffett, and then they’d roll, with the higher number winning. These weren’t standard dice — …