It’s a problem that sounds simple, but the best minds in mathematics have puzzled over it for generations: A salesman wants to hawk his wares in several cities and return home when he’s done. If he’s ...

Not long ago, a team of researchers from Stanford and McGill universities broke a 35-year record in computer science by an almost imperceptible margin — four hundredths of a trillionth of a trillionth ...

Is it hopeless to try to compute the shortest route to visit a large number of cities? Not just a good route but the guaranteed shortest. The task is the long-standing challenge known as the traveling ...

Nathan Klein receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Computers are good at answering questions. What’s the shortest route from my house to Area 51? Is 8,675,309 a prime number? How many ...