Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. All of modern mathematics is built on ...

Can mathematics handle things that are essentially the same without being exactly equal? Category theorist Eugenia Cheng and host Steven Strogatz discuss the power and pleasures of abstraction.

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...