With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex ...

Color-changing fibers are helping scientists to understand, for the first time, the exact ways some knots hold tighter than others. In 2018, researchers developed pressure-sensitive fibers in part to ...

MIT researchers develop a mathematical model to predict a knot’s stability with the help of color-changing fibers. Photo by Joseph Sandt Knots are some of the oldest and most-used technologies that ...

Suppose someone hands you a loop of string with a big tangle in it. There is probably no mathematical way known for you to determine whether it can be untangled without cutting it. Three members of ...

Several University of Texas at Austin mathematics faculty, including an incoming assistant professor, have seen their work spotlighted in the science publication Quanta in recent weeks. Distinct in 3D ...

Mathematicians have studied knots for centuries, but a new material is showing why some knots are better than others. One sunny day last summer, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts ...

Knot theory is the mathematical branch of topology that studies mathematical knots, which are defined as embeddings of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3. This is basically equivalent to a ...

NEW YORK — A series of surprising discoveries is helping the practitioners of one of the purest forms of mathematics — the theory of knots — to attack a fundamental problem of their discipline: How to ...