Here’s a simple-sounding problem: Imagine a circular fence that encloses one acre of grass. If you tie a goat to the inside of the fence, how long a rope do you need to allow the animal access to ...

Three mathematicians show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized. Around 450 BCE, Anaxagoras of ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

But now, two mathematician friends have used their quarantine time to crack a variation of the age-old geometry problem. They analyzed a set of loopy shapes called smooth, continuous curves to prove ...