Topology

The shape of the cosmos could be much more complex than anyone had ever imagined

Squaring numbers can have surprising consequences

The Al Rihla may fly more quickly through the air than previous World Cup balls

His groundbreaking work combined the mathematical field of topology with string theory

The Cantor set is huge, but there isn't very much there.

So it's cold and rainy, and you're up a little too late trying to figure out why that one pesky assumption is necessary in a theorem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just order up a space that was path connected but not locally connected?

For Halloween, I wrote about a very scary topic: higher homotopy groups. Homotopy is an idea in topology, the field of math concerned with properties of shapes that stay the same no matter how you squish or stretch them, as long as you don’t tear them or glue things together.

Now is your chance to prove some theorems without knowing what they mean! Chris Staecker, a mathematician at Fairfield University, created the game Nice Neighbors to get crowd-sourced solutions to problems from a field called digital topology.

Enter the world of 3-dimensional holes in 2-dimensional objects.

Surfaces are complicated. Triangles are simple. That’s an idea behind some methods of creating computer graphics and some advanced mathematics.

Last year, the inimitable Vi Hart made a Thanksgiving video series, describing how to imbue your holiday celebration with more mathematics.

The dissonance between the mathematical and plain English meanings of terms can prove challenging for students