What’s slice? It’s the umbrella term for two properties that this kind of mathematical knot can have. And a mathematical knot is a whole major field of study unto itself, inspired by regular knots ...

Half a century ago, a brilliant young mathematician named John Horton Conway discovered, of all things, a knot. This wasn’t the sort of knot that you’d be likely to encounter in the real world. You ...

It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway. In the summer of 2018, at a conference ...

Over 60 years ago, Ralph Fox posed a problem about knots that haunts mathematicians to this day. His question is now often formulated as the “slice-ribbon conjecture,” which posits that two seemingly ...