At the beginning of the 20th century, the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) advocated an ambitious program to formulate a system of axioms and rules of inference that would encompass all ...

Programmers normally want to minimize the time their code takes to execute. But in 1962, the Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó posed the opposite problem. He asked: How long can a simple computer ...

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound questions and concepts in mathematics.