Major Advances In Knot Theory

An anonymous reader sends us to Science News, which is running a survey of recent strides in finding an answer to the age-old question: How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? "Mathematicians have been puzzling over that question for a century or two, and the main thing they've discovered is that the question is really, really hard. In the last decade, though, they've developed some powerful new tools inspired by physics that have pried a few answers from the universe's clutches. Even more exciting is that the new tools seem to be the tip of a much larger theory that mathematicians are just beginning to uncover. That larger mathematical theory, if it exists, may help crack some of the hardest mathematical questions there are, questions about the mathematical structure of the three- and four-dimensional space where we live. ... Revealing the full ... superstructure may be the work of a generation."

Comments

Re:This is so very important...

[ScentCone]

Hundreds of thousands of innocents dying in the middle east because of corrupt politicians in the whitehouse

Right, because the foreign insurgents coming in from Syria and Iran, using Iranian-supplied cash and weapons, killing them with market bombs or taking them out back and shooting them aren't a factor. Most of them are killed Eeeevil Coaltion Troops.

Hundreds of billions more being paid to wealthy wallstreet cronies

Let's see... those would the cronies who've made their largest campaign contributions to Democrats? Who leveraged themselves and their investment banking customers into ruin by overreaching on investments built around highly risky, undercapitalized mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie... whose two largest recipients of campaign donations were Democrats (Obama and Dodd)... and whose financial shakiness, despite being pointed out directly by the White House in congressional hearings two years ago, were shouted down by the Democrats chairing the committee (see Barney Frank, et al) who said, "never mind, things are just fine with those institutions, you scare-mongering Republicans."

And the responsible politicians are still in power

Yup, and they're about to get an even larger majority in the house and senate, and a president who will no longer even pretend to have an interest in vetoing the incredible flow of pork and government-in-your-life that's about to spew out of Pelosi and Reid. Won't that be fun!.