The Sudoku solution
Mathematicians use Sudoku to understand a mysterious, powerful algorithm
You’re under a deadline, but your daughter will never forgive you if you miss her soccer game. Either obligation alone would be no problem, but trying to find the solution that satisfies everyone — or least minimizes their dissatisfaction — makes your stomach churn.
The same problem, it turns out, plagues science. And optics researchers may have found a solution. An algorithm they developed to balance competing constraints (like your daughter’s soccer game and your deadline) has been used to predict how proteins fold, improve radiation treatment for cancer, and even solve Sudoku puzzles.
Until a mathematician and a physicist caught wind of it, though, no one realized it might apply to anything much beyond manufacturing telescopes and microscopes.