The internet still needed a way for anyone to send a secret message to anyone else without first agreeing on a shared secret. It needed a way to sign digital documents and prove identity; a lock that could be made public without giving away the key. That lock was RSA. Read more
Paul Erdős is undisputedly the most prolific mathematician to ever have lived. He published over 1500 papers while he was alive, and worked with over 500 collaborators. It is perhaps the number of collaborators which stands out even more so than the number of papers published.
Though it may seem paradoxical, most people have fewer collaborators than their own collaborators do on average. This is known as the “friendship” paradox and is normally framed as your friends having, on average, more friends than you. Read more
At a time in which AI is revolutionizing the practice of mathematics – in some areas overtaking human capabilities – mathematicians are turning to the old-fashioned essay to express their thoughts on where humans could and should fit into the equation. Read more
In the latest HLFF Spotlight, we meet Jimoh Abdulganiyu, a computer scientist and Graduate Research Assistant working at the Utah Water Research Laboratory, where he uses hyperspectral imaging to analyze vegetation affected by dust brought about by the erosion of the Great Salt Lake. Read more
There are a set of numbers that seem intrinsic to the world, so linked to other important sequences, that they seem to hold an almost spiritual significance. These numbers are those whose proper divisors (i.e. all the positive divisors excluding itself) sum to the original number. These are the aptly named Perfect Numbers. Read more
It is customary in January to write a blog post containing mathematical facts about the year. For us maths writers, 2025 truly was a gift, and you can see just why in Katie’s excellent post last year. But the chances of having two consecutive years with so many fun facts are, as one might expect, small. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is a dearth of interesting facts about 2026.
But do not fear! This is not going to be a list of anti-facts, of things that are not true about the number 2026. There is one fact that is so fun that I think it might blow all the 2025 facts out the water. Read more