Group theory serves as a fundamental language for describing symmetry in both mathematics and physics. Finite groups, defined by their limited number of elements, are central to modern algebra and ...
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2003, a German graduate student named Britta Späth encountered the McKay conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in the ...
What do the integers have in common with the symmetries of a triangle? In the 19th century, mathematicians invented groups as an answer to this question. Mathematics started with numbers — clear, ...