Stories by Jack Murtagh

A dispute over how to divvy up the pot in an interrupted game of chance led early mathematicians to invent modern risk assessment

The Diffie-Hellman key exchange secures everything from your text messages to government secrets

Here’s how a mathematical paradox distorts our view of news, safety and statistics

Sum up the circles in this math puzzle

George Pólya’s random walk theorem absolved him of being a lurker and revealed how the laws of chance interact with physical space

Uncovering the CIA’s Kryptos puzzle took three parts math and one part sleuthing

A decades-old technique from network science saw something in the papal conclave that AI missed

Find out how this simple algorithm from the 1960s catches your typos

In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity

Here’s the surprising math at the heart of auction theory

A breakthrough in Hilbert’s sixth problem is a major step in grounding physics in math

How an incorrect value of pi almost got codified into law

What’s the largest couch that can turn a corner? After 58 years, we finally know

A look at the curious history of Venn diagrams and the way they blend logic with geometry

Thousands of notoriously difficult problems in computer science are actually the same problem in disguise

The discovery of a new prime number highlights the rising price of mathematical gold

Math’s “best-choice problem” could help humans become better decision-makers at everything from choosing the best job candidate to finding a romantic partner

Mathematician Gauss left behind a trophy case of mathematical achievements to highlight on his tombstone, but above all he wanted a regular heptadecagon etched on it

Why a mathematician thought this infinite series explained how God created the universe

Poker players can now employ AI to find the optimal playing strategy, but they often don’t use it. Here’s why

Ada Lovelace’s wisdom about the first general-purpose computer can be found buried in the appendix of another paper

The most common test of statistical significance originated from the Guinness brewery. Here’s how it works

If pi is a “normal” number, the constant would contain much more than Shakespeare, resolving why such a random-looking number lives at the heart of simple circles

Are you smarter than an 18th-century Prussian?