The notion that some computational problems in math and computer science can be hard should come as no surprise. There is, in fact, an entire class of problems deemed impossible to solve algorithmically. Just below this class lie slightly "easier" problems that are less well-understood—and may be...

An alternative statistical method honed and advanced by Cornell researchers can make clinical trials more reliable and trustworthy while also helping to remedy what has been called a "replicability crisis" in the scientific community....

A pair of researchers at the University of Oxford has found that over the past few decades, the outcome of European League professional football (soccer in the U.S.) matches has become more predictable. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Victor Martins Maimone and...

When Delphi-Facebook and the U.S. Census Bureau provided near-real time estimates of COVID-19 vaccine uptake last spring, their weekly surveys drew on responses from as many as 250,000 people....

For the first time, computer scientists and mathematicians have used artificial intelligence to help prove or suggest new mathematical theorems in the complex fields of knot theory and representation theory....

Quick—if you had to guess, what would you think is most likely to end all life on Earth: a meteor strike, climate change or a solar flare? (Choose carefully.)...

Consider a soap bubble. The way it contains the minimal possible surface area is surprisingly efficient. This is not a trivial issue. Mathematicians have been looking for better ways to calculate minimal surfaces for hundreds of years. Recently, Computer Science and Engineering Department Assistant...

Mathematicians who study dynamical systems often focus on the rules of attraction. Namely, how does the choice of the starting point affect where a system ends up? Some systems are easier to describe than others. A swinging pendulum, for example, will always land at the lowest point no matter where...

Lorin Crawford explains how he uses math to analyze interactions between genes. Your DNA (the biological instruction manual in all of your cells) contains a mind-boggling amount of information represented in roughly 20,000 genes that encode proteins, plus a similar number of genes with other...

In computer science, the graph coloring problem is a classic. Inspired by the map-coloring problem, it asks: Given a network of nodes connected by links, what's the minimum number of colors you need to color each node so that no links connect two of the same color? For small numbers of colors and...