Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians ...
Editor's Note: This article, provided by The Conversation, is a follow-up to one posted yesterday. The original is here. A couple of days ago on The Conversation, I set myself up with a task: to ...
Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...
Graphs are everywhere. In discrete mathematics, they are structures that show the connections between points, much like a ...
One of the curious properties of mathematics is its beauty. But exactly what mathematicians mean by beauty is hard to capture. Perhaps the most famous example is Euler’s relation, e iπ + 1 = 0, which ...
Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...
A new theory could bring a way to make quantum algorithm development less of an accidental process, say scientists. In 2019, Google claimed it was the first to demonstrate a quantum computer ...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.