The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a ...

Two computer scientists found — in the unlikeliest of places — just the idea they needed to make a big leap in graph theory. This past October, as Jacob Holm and Eva Rotenberg were thumbing through a ...

Systems Approach Last year a couple of people forwarded to me the same article on a new method of finding shortest paths in networks.… The underlying research claims to improve on the classic approach ...