Quanta Magazine

‘Nasty’ Geometry Breaks Decades-Old Tiling Conjecture

Mathematicians predicted that if they imposed enough restrictions on how a shape might tile space, they could force a periodic pattern to emerge. But they were wrong. One of the oldest and simplest ...
IFLScience on MSN

"Once In A Century" Math Proof Threads The Needle On A Decades-Old Conjecture

If pure math can teach us anything, it’s this: occasionally, your special interest might just change the world. For Joshua Zahl and Hong Wang, that special interest was the Kakeya conjecture. “I read ...
Quanta Magazine

‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture

Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the ...