Long before robots could run or cars could drive themselves, mathematicians contemplated a simple mathematical question. They figured it out, then laid it to rest—with no way of knowing that the ...

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Socrates challenging a student with the "doubling the square" problem in about 385 B.C.E. When asked to double the area of a square, the student doubled the ...

Children’s blocks lie scattered on the floor. You start playing with them — squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons — moving them around, flipping them over, seeing how they fit together. You feel ...

You can probably think of a time when you’ve used math to solve an everyday problem, such as calculating a tip at a restaurant or determining the square footage of a room. But what role does math play ...

The last dimension of Keller's conjecture has been proven using a computer algorithm. The conjecture involves the way hypercubes in different dimensions share sides when tiled. The proof is ...

"Even the +, −, =, and x signs we take for granted only came into widespread use in the 17th century. Which means that the earlier algebraists we know of … all had expressed their equations mostly in ...

Given that humans have been studying numbers for thousands of years, you might think we know everything about the number 3. But mathematicians recently discovered something new about 3: a third way to ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Least squares solution of F= PG with respect to positive semidefinite symmetric P is considered,a new necessary and sufficient condition for ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Based on the generalized minimal residual (GMRES) principle, Hu and Reichel proposed a minimal residual algorithm for the Sylvester equation.