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A Self-Taught Math Genius Wrote This Riddle While Serving Time in Prison. Can You Solve It? Evelyn Lamb © Kory Kennedy Self-taught student Chris Havens got his number theory riddle published in a mathematics magazine. Last year, Christopher Havens, an inmate serving to 25 years for murder, made headlines as the lead author on an academic paper published in Research in Number Theory. Havens had dropped out of high school, but discovered his fascination with mathematics shortly after starting his 2011 sentence and began teaching himself number theory—the study of integers ...

The secret is complex analysis, giving a new frame of reference for the problem. How do you mix the irrational world of pi with the real world of . . . goats? This is the spirit of a You love freaking out about math. So do we. Let's freak out together. The problem: For a goat to be able to eat grass in a circle with an area of exactly one half acre, how much rope does it need? The answer has been approximate for centuries, providing food for thought for mathematicians who enjoyed pondering an idle headscratcher. Now, there’s finally a concrete equation.