As their results began to crystallize, at first they didn’t notice the striking patterns emerging. But a colleague who reviewed their work spotted the famed Fibonacci numbers—a list whose entries have ...

It’s wild to think that a math puzzle from the 1200s is now helping power AI, encryption, and the digital world we live in. Every November 23, math lovers celebrate Fibonacci Day, a nod to the ...

Fourteen years ago, the mathematicians Dusa McDuff and Felix Schlenk stumbled upon a hidden geometric garden that is only now beginning to flower. The pair were interested in a certain kind of oblong ...

A variation of a puzzle called the “pick-up sticks problem” asks the following question: If I have some number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of ...

The Markov numbers reveal the secrets of irrational numbers and the patterns of the Fibonacci sequence. But there’s one question about them that has resisted proof ...