Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed ...
The following is an excerpt from The Gravity of Math: How Geometry Rules the Universe by Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. Copyright 2024. Available from Basic Books ...
In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...