Eigenvalues to the rescue
On a quiet afternoon, professor Meth is working in her office in Leiden on some tantalizing mathematics problems. Suddenly, someone knocking on her door nervously disrupts the silence.
Writing with Analytic Storytelling
Together with Arnaud Bom from Analytic Storytelling, we decided to promote some of the articles on the Network Pages because of the creative writing techniques the authors used. We want to share these writing tips with you so that you can apply them in your writings!
What have Donald Trump, an epidemiologist and a rock in common?
In this article, dear reader, I am going to show you in which way the development of your opinion during the last political issue, the spread of a virus among your acquaintances during the current pandemic, and the alignment of some particles lying inside the device from which you are reading this article are extremely comparable phenomena.
The travelling salesman problem
Suppose you have a delivery service. You have one truck and have to deliver a large number of parcels to different cities in the country every day. Then you run into the following problem: in which order should you visit the cities?
How do you decide who is the most important?
Imagine you’re in a remote village and only have a limited number of vaccines to distribute to protect the community from a deadly virus, who do you vaccinate?
A difficult decision, but necessary. Assuming that the disease is just as deadly for everyone in the community, the best way to prevent deaths is to contain the spread of the virus.
Her Maths Story
There are so many interesting and inspiring initiatives trying to show how rich and beautiful the world of science is!
Summer reads Part 3: Algorithms and the mathematical theory of graphs
In this article, we have collected all the articles concerning algorithms and the mathematical theory of graphs. Enjoy!
Brain-inspired computers operating at the speed of light
A car, a home, and a wristwatch, all of them seem to be “smart” today. This intelligence runs on computing, which lately made the headlines for being scarce to obtain.
Reading mathematics in Braille
Have you ever wondered how people with a severe visual impairment practice and understand mathematics?
How many colors do you need to color a map?
A mathematician once told me that problems that are very simple to state can be very deceiving, and sometimes turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. One such problem was the Four Color Problem.