Mathematicians are “reinventing the wheel” by giving it a new shape. Their newly imagined wheel looks like a many-dimensional guitar pick, and it could theoretically roll in ways beyond our ...

The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 69, No. 3 (MARCH 2018), pp. 402-415 (14 pages) This paper presents a heuristic for the guillotine two-dimensional bin packing problem, where a set ...

A problem doesn't last a lifetime. But how you deal with it can make it linger for years without resolution. In my studies about the topic, I've identified that, in addition to everything that ...

When it comes to understanding the shape of bubble clusters, mathematicians have been playing catch-up to our physical intuitions for millennia. Soap bubble clusters in nature often seem to ...

Mathematicians have long pondered the reach of a grazing goat tied to a fence, only finding approximate answers until now. Here’s a simple-sounding problem: Imagine a circular fence that encloses one ...

Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the ...