Hong Wang, an associate professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, presenting her work on the Kakeya conjecture on March 10, 2025. Credit: David Song/NYU. Mathematicians from New ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an ...

In 1919, just a couple of years after Kakeya posed his problem, the Russian mathematician Abram Besicovitch showed that if you arrange your needles in a very particular way, you can construct a thorny ...