Imaginary numbers are a reality
It is undeniable that natural, integer, rational and real numbers are necessary to explain what happens in our daily life, but in high school some of us also hear about some weird objects called imaginary numbers, also known as complex numbers. What do we need these numbers for?
Playing with Colors Part 2: An open problem related to graph colouring
Mathematicians often enjoy playing around with the concept of infinity and in the following, I will describe a problem defined on an infinite graph!
Playing with Colors
Part 1: Learn about applied and theoretical aspects of graph coloring: a tool that helps us design exam schedules or even solve Sudoku!
Start to jet lag behind. Moving to fairer competitions.
It is safe to say that traveling impacts the peak performance of teams and athletes in general - studies have been done across all kinds of sports that confirm this intuitive idea. Thus, to avoid unfair- and unhappiness, an organizer should aim to minimize the effect of travel time disparities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Delegated and Distributed Quantum Computation
During the last decades, many resources have been invested in quantum computing. This research field has grown immensely and amazing results have been obtained. The plans for the future are highly ambitious, but at the same time, there are serious questions that need to be addressed.
The share bike mystery
How is it possible that bikes are so perfectly spread out that they are available from almost anywhere? Who are these bike fairies that distribute them evenly across the city? Continue reading if you like to find out who they are and what type of mathematics is involved.