Ramsey numbers: Breakthrough in fiendishly hard puzzle has mathematicians partying
The key to a successful party is a good mix of people
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Mathematicians have made a breakthrough on an incredibly difficult problem in combinatorics, the study of combinations. It is the first significant advance in nearly a century for our understanding of Ramsey numbers, which can be used to describe the minimum size of a party where cliques of a certain size can or can’t exist.
Named after mathematician Frank Ramsey, these numbers deal with the possible relationships between nodes on a mathematical network called a graph, which are a …