Suppose someone hands you a loop of string with a big tangle in it. There is probably no mathematical way known for you to determine whether it can be untangled without cutting it. Three members of ...

Mathematicians say knots cannot exist in four-dimensional space. (Image: Canva) Knots cannot exist in four-dimensional space, say mathematicians. In 4D, any knot can be untied without cutting the rope ...

MIT researchers develop a mathematical model to predict a knot’s stability with the help of color-changing fibers. Photo by Joseph Sandt Knots are some of the oldest and most-used technologies that ...

At the heart of every resonator — be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone — there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged.

You may not have heard of knot theory. But take it from Bill Menasco, a knot theorist of 35 years: This field of mathematics, rich in aesthetic beauty and intellectual challenges, has come a long way ...

When Lisa Piccirillo solved a decades-old mystery about the “Conway knot,” she had to overcome the knot’s uncanny ability to hoodwink some of the most powerful tools mathematicians have devised. Known ...

Mathematicians have studied knots for centuries, but a new material is showing why some knots are better than others. One sunny day last summer, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts ...

Color-changing fibers are helping scientists to understand, for the first time, the exact ways some knots hold tighter than others. In 2018, researchers developed pressure-sensitive fibers in part to ...

Knot-shaped micrometric tubes embedded in a liquid crystal induce the formation of defect lines that loop around the knotted tubes to form knots. The possibility of tying knots within physical fields ...