History is full of backstabbing rivalries: Edison and Tesla, Harding and Kerrigan, Tupac and Biggie. No less dramatic was a 16th-century conflict between Italian mathematicians Gerolamo Cardano, a ...

For centuries, one of algebra’s oldest puzzles has remained unsolved—how to find exact answers for higher-degree polynomials, where the variable is raised to the fifth power or more. Mathematicians ...