The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...

Set theory is a mathematical abstract concerned with the grouping of sets of numbers that have commonality. For example, all even numbers make up a set, and all odd numbers comprise a set. All numbers ...

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.

We develop a novel framework, the implicit hitting set approach, for solving a class of combinatorial optimization problems. The explicit hitting set problem is as follows: given a set U and a family ...

In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the mathematical realm known as group theory. At first her goals were ...