Half a century ago, a brilliant young mathematician named John Horton Conway discovered, of all things, a knot. This wasn’t the sort of knot that you’d be likely to encounter in the real world. You ...

OVER the course of one week in 2018, Lisa Piccirillo cracked a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for half a century. Posed by legendary mathematician John Conway in 1970, it concerns a ...

The picture below may not look that complicated to people unfamiliar with knot theory, but it's been confounding mathematicians for decades. Now, a graduate student-turned-MIT professor holds the ...

“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 ...