In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail on a greuling and dangerous quest: the first-ever voyage around the world. But since that first daring adventure, advances in sailing technology and navigation ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

In algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph — a network of nodes connected by links, or edges. Often, these ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...

Vol. 52, No. 1, Special Issue on Uncertainty in Logistics and Transportation Systems (January–February 2018), pp. 80-101 (22 pages) This study addresses various formulations of the optimal reliability ...

Imagine you are sailing on the ocean but your boat is incapable of turning. What would be the longest straight path you could take without hitting land? This question was the focus of a post that ...