In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He ...
Mathematicians were disturbed, centuries ago, to find that calculating the properties of certain curves demanded the seemingly impossible: numbers that, when multiplied by themselves, turn negative.
The Kakeya conjecture predicts how much room you need to point a line in every direction. In one number system after another — with one important exception — mathematicians have been proving it true.
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