Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and — wait for it — 47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy ...

Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and — wait for it — 47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy ...

Most people probably don’t think of mathematics when they hear “busy beavers.” But these eager little animals symbolize one of the most amazing concepts of the knotty field: not everything can be ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a mathematical problem that tries to calculate the longest possible run-time of a Turing machine ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

Amateur mathematicians are closing in on an unimaginably huge number – one so large that it brushes up on the edge of what is even knowable within the framework of modern mathematics. It all stems ...