A Fleet of Computers Helps Settle a 90-Year-Old Math Problem

A team of mathematicians has finally finished off Keller's conjecture, but not by working it out themselves. Instead, they taught a fleet of computers to do it for them. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop ments and trends in mathe matics and the physical and life sciences. Keller's conjecture, posed 90 years ago by Ott-Heinrich Keller, is a problem about covering spaces with identical tiles. It asserts that if you cover a two-dimensional space with two-dimensional square tiles, at least two of the tiles must share an edge.