This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American This blog is called "Roots of Unity" because ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I started Roots of Unity in January 2013, so ...

Hilbert’s 12th problem asked for novel analogues of the roots of unity, the building blocks for certain number systems. Now, over 100 years later, two mathematicians have produced them. Problems in ...

We show that the image of the braid group under the monodromy action on the homology of a cyclic covering of degree d of the projective line is an arithmetic group provided the number of branch points ...