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Mathematician Hurls Structure and Disorder Into Century-Old Problem

The Quanta Podcast

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How to String Longer Bead Strings

Mathematician Ben Green shows how to create much longer bead strings than Ron Graham predicted. In a version of the problem in which you forbid even the shortest evenly spaced blue sequences, he speculated that a simple relationship holds. The construction blends geometry and dynamical systems to fashion the disordered bead strings. It has applications in things like matrix multiplication and cryptography.

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