The KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm’s Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson is the leader of a small team of mathematicians who have published a paper on the preprint server arXiv outlining the mathematical procedure they used to discover that there are 177,147 more ways to tie a knot than previous studies had suggested.
In reality, there are far more ways to tie a tie than most people would ever imagine. As a result, mathematicians occasionally set themselves the task of determining whether the number is finite and, if so, what that number might be.
Most men don’t think of more than one, two, or maybe three ways to tie their ties, if they tie one at all.
