Conway’s knot, a famous mathematical problem, was a tricky one to untangle. Mathematicians have been arguing about how to solve it for more than 50 years—until 2018, when graduate student Lisa ...

“I didn’t allow myself to work on it during the day,” she said, “because I didn’t consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework.” The question asked whether the Conway knot—a snarl ...

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 ...

When faced with an unsolvable problem, you are said to face a “Gordian knot,” a rope that is tied so intricately or tangled so completely that it is impossible to untie. If you dive a little deeper ...