Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    Why Mathematicians Can’t Find the Hay in a Haystack

    by Kevin Hartnett Oct 05, 2018 3 minutes

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.

    In math, sometimes the most common things are the hardest to find.Photograph by Vladyslav Danilin / Shutterstock

    The first time I heard a mathematician use the phrase, I was sure he’d misspoken. We were on the phone, talking about the search for shapes with certain properties, and he said, “It’s like looking for hay in a haystack.”

    “Don’t you mean a needle?” I almost

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus7 min read
    The Feminist Botanist
    Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o
    Nautilus13 min read
    The Shark Whisperer
    In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places
    Nautilus9 min read
    The Invasive Species
    Several features of animal bodies have evolved and disappeared, then re-evolved over the history of the planet. Eyes, for example, both simple like people’s and compound like various arthropods’, have come and gone and come again. But species have no

    Related Books & Audiobooks