Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory. This past October, as Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg were thumbing through a ...

Computer scientists are abuzz over a fast new algorithm for solving one of the central problems in the field. (January 15, 2017, update: On January 4, Babai retracted his claim that the new algorithm ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...