When Lisa Piccirillo solved a decades-old mystery about the “Conway knot,” she had to overcome the knot’s uncanny ability to hoodwink some of the most powerful tools mathematicians have devised. Known ...

Tie a trefoil knot in a piece of string, seal the ends together, and try to wiggle it free without cutting. In three-dimensional space, the knot holds firm. Add a fourth spatial dimension, however, ...

Informally, a dynamic system is any physical system that evolves with time (e.g., a pendulum, a planet orbiting the sun, the weather, etc). From a more mathematically precise perspective, one can ...

Chinese mathematicians have resolved the loose end of a “doomsday hypothesis” that had long puzzled the mathematical community. The feat was made possible through major computational methods which ...

Invariants and elasticity tensors play a pivotal role in the mathematical and physical description of material behaviour. By characterising properties that remain unchanged under coordinate ...

Topological materials – materials whose surface properties are very different to those in their bulk – have come to the fore in recent years and are currently revolutionizing modern condensed matter ...