The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots. The Scottish mathematician, whose research ...

Imagine living sometime around the early 1600s. You're standing on the deck of a wooden ship. The wind's biting, the sky's endless. And your captain's yelling, "Drop the log!" Back then, before sonar ...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate The Knot Worldwide after his office received dozens of new complaints accusing the wedding planning site of ...

The improved clinch knot has long been the standard for tying lures to fishing lines. In fact, it's so universal among anglers that it's sometimes called the fisherman's knot. It's easy to learn, ...

Knots proponents claim to be supporters of Bitcoin's decentralization and its use as censorship resistant money, but their actions do not align with that claim. They claim to fight for mining ...

Scanning the crowd at a fancy soiree may reveal a wide array of neckties, each fastened with a highly complex mathematical object masquerading as fashion. An entire field of mathematics is devoted to ...

Why is untangling two small knots more difficult than unravelling one big one? Surprisingly, mathematicians have found that larger and seemingly more complex knots created by joining two simpler ones ...

Still struggling with poor video quality? We all have those precious family footage from an old camcorder, grainy concert video clips, 720p AI videos, or even modern mobile footage that came out ...

The mammalian cortex, the region of the brain responsible for a wide range of higher-level cognitive functions, including sensory perception, motor control, and complex thought, is composed of a ...

Here on land, the speed of a vehicle is recorded in either miles per hour or kilometers per hour. In either case, determining how fast you're moving on land is fairly simple because you can see ...