The ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem Only Appears Simple

Mathematicians have made fresh progress on the long-standing lonely runner conjecture.

A recent proof handled the case of eight runners, and a follow-up extended it to nine and 10 runners.

The advance revives interest in a decades-old open problem that has resisted major progress for years.

The conjecture has connections to number theory, geometry, graph theory, and irrational approximation.