Mathematicians have long wondered how “shapes of constant width” behave in higher dimensions. A surprisingly simple construction has given them an answer. In 1986, after the space shuttle Challenger ...

Strike a billiard ball on a frictionless table with no pockets so that it never stops bouncing off the table walls. If you returned years later, what would you find? Would the ball have settled into ...

Mathematicians are “reinventing the wheel” by giving it a new shape. Their newly imagined wheel looks like a many-dimensional guitar pick, and it could theoretically roll in ways beyond our ...

Nature builds problem-solvers through real-life challenges The post How the Forest Teaches Problem Solving Better Than Any ...

Ending a six-decade-old mathematical mystery with the help of computational methods, a trio of Chinese scientists have proven that manifolds of Kervaire invariant one do exist in dimension 126. The ...

The research addressing two-dimensional (2D) irregular shape packing has largely focused on the strip packing variant of the problem. However, it can be argued that this is a simplification. The ...