This article is part of an effort to resurface Globe readers’ most loved stories or timeless reports you might have missed. It was originally published on August 20, 2020. It was updated on April 10, ...

OVER the course of one week in 2018, Lisa Piccirillo cracked a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for half a century. Posed by legendary mathematician John Conway in 1970, it concerns a ...

“I didn’t allow myself to work on it during the day,” she said, “because I didn’t consider it to be real math. I thought it was, like, my homework.” The question asked whether the Conway knot—a snarl ...