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 1996, Dor, Halperin, and Zwick introduced an influential method that delivered a “2-approximation” in nearly optimal time. Its estimate would not exceed twice the true shortest distance. If two ...

Most of you have used a navigation app like Google Maps for your travels at some point. These apps rely on algorithms that compute shortest paths through vast networks. Now imagine scaling that task ...