It is rare to read about “spectacular progress” or a “once-in-a-century” result in mathematics. That’s for good reason: if a problem has not had a solution for many years, then completely new ...

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 ...

How bees, beer cans and big data all solve the same problem: not enough space. By Steven Strogatz Photo illustrations by Jens Mortensen Each installment of “Math, Revealed” starts with an object, ...

The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 69, No. 3 (MARCH 2018), pp. 402-415 (14 pages) This paper presents a heuristic for the guillotine two-dimensional bin packing problem, where a set ...

A problem doesn't last a lifetime. But how you deal with it can make it linger for years without resolution. In my studies about the topic, I've identified that, in addition to everything that ...