Introduction

Mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem. The new paper demonstrates how to create much longer, disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible. It extends a line of work from the 1940s that's found applications in many areas of computer science. Explore math mysteries in the Quanta book The Prime Number Conspiracy,. available now at amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and your local bookstore.