No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer. “Hey — I’ve got holes in some of my jeans.

Julia Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Mathematicians have long wondered how “shapes of constant width” behave in higher dimensions. A surprisingly simple construction has given them an answer. In 1986, after the space shuttle Challenger ...

Excerpted with permission from Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark. Available from Random House/Knopf. Copyright ...