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Problems Solved LLC

Personal service, professional solutions, serving the washington, dc metropolitan area..

Problems Solved LLC performs computer and technology work in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Our approach emphasizes local and personalized service and a research-based approach to technology problems.

Local. Personal. Reliable.

The frustrations of dealing with unresponsive offshore computer support and large corporate outfits are well known. In contrast, we take pride in our local, personalized service. We deal with the issues you want solved, and we explain our work so you can understand it. We strive to know your computer as a doctor knows a patient.

A Research-Oriented Approach

The range of computer and technology-related knowledge is staggering. No person can know all information about the computers, peripherals, electronics, and problems that they encounter. The key is to mobilize know-how quickly when it is needed. We have the research skills that enable us to find and apply the solutions to your computer problems. We take pride in our versatility.

Justin Polin is  president of Problems Solved LLC. Mr. Polin has a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He has nearly two decades of computer experience with Macs (dating back to the old Performa 400) and over a decade of experience with PCs . Mr. Polin combines technological expertise with a strong research background, having worked on national security issues at three Washington think tanks.

How to cut a mango easily (3 different methods)

If you've ever tasted the sweet, tropical goodness of a perfectly ripe mango, you know it can be a blissful experience. Unfortunately, cutting one can be sticky, slippery and even slightly unsafe if you don't have the right tricks up your sleeve. Luckily, we're giving you the lowdown on three foolproof methods to slice and dice a mango like a pro and extract every ounce of deliciousness. Whether you're a novice in the kitchen or a seasoned chef, these techniques will streamline the process and ensure you make the most of every mango. 

From the easy twist and scoop method to the traditional slice and score approach and even a clever hack using a cup to peel, we're sharing all you need to effortlessly tackle an otherwise tricky task. Here are three ways to cut and peel a mango easily.

Spoiled fruit: How to keep fruit fresh longer

How to cut a mango easily

Mango cutting rule of thumb: 

They're easier to cut when ripe. They should be ripe, vibrant in color, soft to the touch and very fragrant.

Easiest method:

• Make a cut in the center and slice all the way around the pit.
• Twist the two halves until they break apart.
• Twist the pit and remove it from the flesh.
• Use a spoon to scoop out the flesh from the two halves.

Traditional method:

• Cut a little bit off of the stem so you have a flat base.
• Stand the mango up on that flat end and cut down the length of the mango to the side of the pit.
• Repeat this process all the way around the mango.
• Switch to a smaller knife or paring knife and score each slice of mango, ensuring you don't cut through the skin.
• Push the scored cubes out away from the skin and simply pull them off to eat.
• Alternatively, you can use your knife to cut the mango cubes away from the skin.

Another easy method:

• Once you have the slices, use a cup to peel it. 
• Place the edge of the cup between the flesh and the skin.
• Push down, separating the flesh from the skin. The cup will act like a spoon, helping to separate the flesh cleanly from the skin.

Egg slicer: What fruits and vegetables you can cut with it

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Reviewed helps you find the best stuff and get the most out of what you already own. Our team of kitchen and cooking experts are always testing new kitchen tools , appliances and more so you can shop for the best of the best.  

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• Editors' Choice hand mixer: Black & Decker MX3200B    
• An excellent cutting board: OXO Good Grips Plastic Utility Cutting Board    
• The best value in cookware: Cuisinart MCP-12N Stainless Steel 12-Piece Cookware Set   
• Our favorite air fryer: Ninja Speedi SF301  

Problem Solved Services

We offer professional irrigation system and landscape lighting services.

The Experts in Sprinkler and Landscape Lighting Systems

At Problem Solved Services in Leesburg, VA, we are dedicated to offering excellent irrigation and landscape lighting services. Our mission is to provide quality work at fair prices to residential and commercial clients across Northern Virginia.

Irrigation Systems

Everyone wants to have a green lawn and be the envy of the neighborhood. To keep grass lush, some people drag out a garden hose with an attached sprinkler and move it around their lawn. This method is considered an inefficient way of watering your lawn because of the vast amount of wasted water. By installing an irrigation system, you can maintain your yard and manage your daily water consumption efficiently.

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Enhance the nighttime curb appeal of your home with our low-voltage landscape lighting services. Illuminating your garden or lawn area also adds a measure of safety and security for you and your family.

We offer exterior-grade fixtures that are typically placed along walkways and driveways. These products are ideal for illuminating steps, trees, stonewalls, fences, and the other prominent landscape elements of your home.

Our Services

• Irrigation Services
• Low-Voltage Lighting Services
• Certified Backflow Testing
• Electronic Dog Fence Repairs

Tony Mortilla

My name is Tony Mortilla. I was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, NY. In 1994, I moved to the Northern Virginia area.

I have more than 25 years of experience in the irrigation and landscape lighting industry. My positions and experiences include foreman, service technician, divisional irrigation and landscape lighting manager, sales, and design.

One of the aspects that has kept the industry interesting is the ever-changing technology. When I first started in the business, irrigation was a luxury, and now it is virtually a necessity.

My goal is to consistently meet your customer service needs and expectations. This includes installation and/or service with my ultimate objective being to enhance the curb appeal of your home.

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Matthew Burtt

My name is Matthew Burtt. I was born and raised in Northern Maine. In the late 1990s, I moved to the Northern Virginia area.

For the last 12 years, I have worked predominantly in the irrigation field with brief periods in construction, water well drilling, and pool installation. My work has provided me with a comprehensive knowledge of residential, commercial, and other large-scale irrigation systems.

Along with installation, my experiences have included plumbing, electrical hookup, and troubleshooting. In addition, I have extensive knowledge and expertise in landscape lighting and water feature installation.

I take pride in tackling a work-related problem head-on and correcting it to the satisfaction of my customer. My goal is to meet your needs by repairing your current irrigation system or replacing it with a new one that will exceed your expectations.

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• Kirsten Dunst On That Memorable Spider-Man Upside-Down Kiss: “It Was Almost Like I Was Resuscitating Him”
• Ex-Gaming Exec With Company That Owns ‘3-Body Problem’ Film Rights Sentenced To Death In China

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• Fox 11 Anchor Susan Hirasuna Has Car Stolen, Advises Police During Chase

A former executive at Yoozoo Games was sentenced to death on Friday in the 2020 poisoning of the company founder. The Chinese gaming company has links to Game of Thrones and the new Netflix series, The 3-Body Problem .

Xu Yao poisoned the food of 39-year-old company founder Lin Qi in December 2020, allegedly because of a dispute over the business operations, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court said.

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Lin Qi, Yoozoo Chairman & Exec Producer On Netflix's 'Three-Body Problem', Dies As Police Probe Alleged Poisoning

Chinese Exec Producer Of Netflix's 'Three-Body Problem' Hospitalized After Alleged Poisoning, Police Detain Colleague

Yoozoo owns the film rights to The 3-Body Problem, a best-selling Chinese science fiction trilogy, and Xu headed up a subsidiary in charge of business related to it, according to Chinese media reports.

In September 2020, the company gave Netflix the right to produce an adaptation of the trilogy. It is produced by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and Lin was listed as an executive producer on the series.

Yoozoo, also known as Youzu Interactive, developed G ame of Thrones: Winter Is Coming, a game based on the TV series.

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Aurora Beacon-News | Problem-solving, critical thinking on display…

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Aurora beacon-news | problem-solving, critical thinking on display at robotics event at aurora municipal airport.

Robots and the kids that built and operated them took center stage all day Friday at the Aurora Municipal Airport in Sugar Grove as 17 students 9 to 16 years old squared off in a competition during the first-ever Elite Robotics Camp, hosted by the U.S. Engineering League and the Wong Center for Education.

The Friday showcase was the culmination of a week-long camp program that included four days of workshops held at the Hampton Inn in Aurora.

A press release issued by the robotics camp said the 17 students involved spent time with a variety of national champions from multiple countries under Anthony Hsu of OFDL Robotics Lab Taiwan, “one of the world’s most accomplished coaches.”

Susan Mackafey, publicist for the Robotics group, said the event in Aurora came about as a result of the competitions that the Wong group hosts worldwide. William Wong, the founder of the Wong Center for Education, is the national organizer for the World Robot Olympiad, according to a press release.

“There were some students from Ukraine and Kazakhstan wondering if there would be any other kind of competitions as they wanted to hone their skills with one of the experts,” she said. “Will Wong ran with it, and has arranged the camp and the competition going on this Friday.”

Two of the camp members from Ukraine – Margo Proutorbva and Sofia Sova – were sponsored by the Wong Center for Education.

“It’s been an emotional trip for them,” Mackafey said, given the war going on in their homeland. “A lot of the kids are looking to train and do this as their careers and they love to compete. There are various levels of this competition that take place on a global scale.”

Local students were on hand as well, some of whom are being sponsored by the Wong Foundation, sources said.

Wong, of Naperville, was supervising Friday at the airport facility and said he started a robotics program with kids back in 2008.

“STEM has become a lot of the focus,” Wong said. “Even before I started, STEM was a big word. Engineering coding has always been there. It’s just how can we have kids do more of it. What’s happened is there are education companies like LEGO and other companies that have built robots that allow us to teach kids robotics in an easy fashion and we can create real world challenges off those robots so they literally are engineering, building and creating, designing and working with teams to have robots do tasks.”

Other than the collaborative learning, Wong said the biggest takeaways of the program “are problem-solving, figuring out how to make things work, a lot of trial-and-error, analysis and critical thinking.”

“There is teamwork, but the biggest is perseverance and working through the problems,” he said. “If the robot doesn’t work the first time or the second time or the 100th time, they are truly going through the engineering process – building, design and the whole cycle.”

Margo Proutorbva, 14, spoke about robotics and said through an interpreter she got interested in them two years ago.

“I’ve learned to assemble them,” she said. “The most difficult part of this has been when you assemble a robot with someone else – it’s way easier when you do it on your own. My robot can grab different objects, follow lines and turn in different ways.”

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.

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Netflix's hit sci-fi series '3 Body Problem' is based on a real math problem that is so complex it's impossible to solve

• The three-body problem is a centuries-old physics question that puzzled Isaac Newton .
• It describes the orbits of three bodies, like planets or stars, trapped in each other's gravity.
• The problem is unsolvable and led to the development of chaos theory.

While Netflix's "3 Body Problem" is a science-fiction show, its name comes from a real math problem that's puzzled scientists since the late 1600s.

In physics, the three-body problem refers to the motion of three bodies trapped in each other's gravitational grip — like a three-star system.

It might sound simple enough, but once you dig into the mathematics, the orbital paths of each object get complicated very quickly.

Two-body vs. three- and multi-body systems

A simpler version is a two-body system like binary stars. Two-body systems have periodic orbits, meaning they are mathematically predictable because they follow the same trajectory over and over. So, if you have the stars' initial positions and velocities, you can calculate where they've been or will be in space far into the past and future.

However, "throwing in a third body that's close enough to interact leads to chaos," Shane Ross, an aerospace and ocean engineering professor at Virginia Tech, told Business Insider. In fact, it's nearly impossible to precisely predict the orbital paths of any system with three bodies or more.

While two orbiting planets might look like a ven diagram with ovular paths overlapping, the paths of three bodies interacting often resemble tangled spaghetti. Their trajectories usually aren't as stable as systems with only two bodies.

All that uncertainty makes what's known as the three-body problem largely unsolvable, Ross said. But there are certain exceptions.

The three-body problem is over 300 years old

The three-body problem dates back to Isaac Newton , who published his "Principia" in 1687.

In the book, the mathematician noted that the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun. Yet the gravitational pull from Jupiter seemed to affect Saturn's orbital path.

Related stories

The three-body problem didn't just affect distant planets. Trying to understand the variations in the moon's movements caused Newton literal headaches, he complained.

But Newton never fully figured out the three-body problem. And it remained a mathematical mystery for nearly 200 years.

In 1889, a Swedish journal awarded mathematician Henri Poincaré a gold medal and 2,500 Swedish crowns, roughly half a year's salary for a professor at the time, for his essay about the three-body problem that outlined the basis for an entirely new mathematical theory called chaos theory .

According to chaos theory, when there is uncertainty about a system's initial conditions, like an object's mass or velocity, that uncertainty ripples out, making the future more and more unpredictable.

Think of it like taking a wrong turn on a trip. If you make a left instead of a right at the end of your journey, you're probably closer to your destination than if you made the mistake at the very beginning.

Can you solve the three-body problem?

Cracking the three-body problem would help scientists chart the movements of meteors and planets, including Earth, into the extremely far future. Even comparatively small movements of our planet could have large impacts on our climate, Ross said.

Though the three-body problem is considered mathematically unsolvable, there are solutions to specific scenarios. In fact, there are a few that mathematicians have found.

For example, three bodies could stably orbit in a figure eight or equally spaced around a ring. Both are possible depending on the initial positions and velocities of the bodies.

One way researchers look for solutions is with " restricted " three-body problems, where two main bodies (like the sun and Earth) interact and a third object with much smaller mass (like the moon) offers less gravitational interference. In this case, the three-body problem looks a lot like a two-body problem since the sun and Earth comprise the majority of mass in the system.

However, if you're looking at a three-star system, like the one in Netflix's show "3 Body Problem," that's a lot more complicated.

Computers can also run simulations far more efficiently than humans, though due to the inherent uncertainties, the results are typically approximate orbits instead of exact.

Finding solutions to three-body problems is also essential to space travel, Ross said. For his work, he inputs data about the Earth, moon, and spacecraft into a computer. "We can build up a whole library of possible trajectories," he said, "and that gives us an idea of the types of motion that are possible."

• Main content

Packers focus on solving Christian Watson’s hamstring problems

• Mike Florio ,
• Mike Florio

Packers receiver Christian Watson missed eight games last year due to hamstring injuries. The Packers are trying to keep that from happening again.

Coach Matt LaFleur explained this week that Watson visited a lab in Madison, with the goal of solving the issue.

“They’ve got some special lab there or whatever that all the medical guys can give you the better diagnosis on [Watson],” LaFleur said, via Pete Dougherty of the Green Bay Press-Gazette . “But yeah, we’ve looked at a lot of different things in terms of just his body comp and maybe areas that were stronger than others to try to help get us in front of that .”

When he plays, Watson is extremely effective. The goal is to have him available for every possible game.

“We’re trying to look at everything we can do to mitigate those risks,” LaFleur said, regarding Watson’s injuries. “I know [Watson] is working his tail off right now down in Florida, trying to make sure that he comes in the best shape possible. Certainly, we looked at elements of the things that we can control because, I mean, soft-tissue injuries happen in our sport. It’s like, how can we mitigate those? And that’s what we’ve looked at, you know, from him personally to what we’re asking of our players from a load perspective, whether it’s in training or practice.”

Watson had 28 catches for 422 yards and five touchdowns in 2023, his second NFL season. No Packers receiver gained more than 793 receiving yards in 2023; the leader with that number was rookie Jayden Reed.

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like ‘Bayadère’? Send In the Cowboys.

A new production of the ballet sets it in 1930s Hollywood instead of a mythic India, eliminating Orientalist clichés while embracing American ones.

By Marina Harss

One after the other, women in white step out of the wings, reaching forward into space before swaying gently back, arms overhead. Then they take two steps forward and begin the sequence all over again. This rocking motion, forward and back, repeats for several minutes, until the stage is filled with bodies hovering on pointe, as if sustained by a single breath.

The scene is from Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadère,” a ballet that premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1877. “The spectators must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven, which was more or less the case,” the dance critic Joan Acocella wrote in 2019 of the entrance of the Shades, or female spirits, in the second act.

That sequence — inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of souls descending from heaven in an edition of Dante’s “Divina Commedia” — is one of the reasons this ballet, set to a mostly unremarkable score by Ludwig Minkus, has survived when so many others have not.

“It’s a simple thing,” the director and choreographer Phil Chan said, “a throwaway step, even.” But the way the scene is structured, he added, “shows you how you can take a single step and give it to an entire group and make it look exciting and interesting.”

Like many operas and ballets from the 19th century, “La Bayadère,” set in an exoticized, ahistoric and sometimes cartoonish India, doesn’t translate well to our times. Some have questioned whether it should be performed at all . And while it continues to be staged around the world, there has been a noticeable reduction in performances, at least in the United States. In 2022, Susan Jaffe, the new artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said in an interview that it was one of the ballets she planned to shelve temporarily, while thinking about how to make changes.

What can be done with a work like “Bayadère”? For Chan and Doug Fullington, a specialist in 19th-century ballet, the solution is to remove it from its exotic context and put it in a setting closer to home, the Hollywood of the 1930s. By setting the ballet in a movie-land far west, and swapping Orientalist clichés for American ones, Chan said, the team was creating “a form of exoticism that is about us, not about ‘them.’”

“The thing is, there’s really nothing Indian about it,” he said of “Bayadère.” “We might as well add a German clog dance or an Argentine tango. It would literally be just as authentic.”

Called “Star on the Rise: La Bayadère … Reimagined!” the new version recasts the “Shades” scene as a dance spectacular à la Busby Berkeley. The staging, produced by Indiana University’s ballet department, will premiere on March 29 in Bloomington, and be livestreamed online as well as at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts .

When “La Bayadère,” was made, far-off places were much in vogue in stage shows. Bizet’s 1863 opera “The Pearl Fishers” was set in Sri Lanka; Verdi’s 1871 opera “Aida” takes place in ancient Egypt; Spain was a frequent setting for both operas and ballets. In 1875, the Prince of Wales undertook a highly publicized tour of India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), both British colonies at the time. Two years later, “La Bayadère” came to the stage.

While in Sri Lanka, the prince had watched a dance performance, a moment that was illustrated in contemporary newspapers. Those illustrations are the likely inspiration for “La Bayadère’s” fast-paced “Danse Infernale,” a fake-tribal number set to a beating drum.

“It’s so problematic, but the music is so fun,” Chan said of “Danse Infernale.” “My idea was that we could take this thing that is so shameful, find the good parts, and make it fun for everybody.” The number, now called “Bronco Busters,” is danced by cowboys who slap their ankles, twirl lassoes and run with their arms behind their backs as if they were about to grab their pistols.

The story of “La Bayadère” hinges on a love triangle among Nikiya, a beautiful temple dancer, or bayadère; a not-so-brave warrior; and a rajah’s haughty daughter. Nikiya is a tragic heroine killed by a venomous snake placed in a basket of flowers by her catty rival.

Chan, born in Hong Kong, is a former dancer who now works to bring cultural awareness to ballet and opera. He has written two books on Orientalism in the performing arts and, with the former New York City Ballet dancer Georgina Pazcoguin, founded Final Bow for Yellowface , an organization that pushes for the elimination of demeaning depictions of Asian characters.

“I don’t think audiences want to see that anymore, this passive, hypersexualized, weak woman who has no agency,” he said about characters like Nikiya and the heroine of the opera “Madama Butterfly.” “Snooze-fest, boring. That’s not who we are anymore.”

Chan recently directed a production of “Madama Butterfly” at Boston Lyric Opera that transposed the story to World War II America; instead of a young geisha, the protagonist is a jazz singer. She doesn’t die at the end.

In “Star on the Rise,” Chan and Fullington’s heroine, a Hollywood starlet, also makes it out alive and takes charge of her destiny. Her rival has a change of heart. This paves the way to a happy ending, celebrated, in true movie musical style, with a big dance number, a Charleston.

Surprisingly, the translation from tragedy to comedy, and from exotic fantasyland to the world of musical theater, wasn’t such a stretch, they said. “I’ve always thought that a lot of the group choreography in ‘La Bayadère’ looked like dance-hall steps,” Fullington, who has co-written a book about Petipa’s ballets , said on a video call.

The plot, which verges on melodrama, easily lent itself to comic treatment. “If you flip these extreme situations in the ballet just a little bit, they become funny,” Fullington said.

The movie “Singin’ in the Rain” pointed to a way to adapt “La Bayadère” for its new Hollywood setting: a backstage story-within-a-story. In “Star on the Rise,” Nikiya becomes Nikki, an aspiring dancer and actress. Her rival, Pamela Zatti, is a longtime star, jealous of the spotlight. Sol is the matinee idol Nikki loves and Zatti wants as her leading man. The rivalry is professional, not romantic.

Chan and Fullington turned the ballet’s suite of colorful ensemble pieces into scenes from a Western fantasy being produced by the cast of the show. Instead of fakirs (ascetics) and dancing girls with parrots affixed to their wrists, the secondary characters have become cowboys, chorus dancers, buckaroos, sheriffs and falconers.

Drawing upon Fullington’s expertise in 19th-century steps and style, the pair decided to use choreography that hewed as closely to the original as possible, as laid out in ballet notations recorded in St. Petersburg when Petipa revived “La Bayadère” in 1900. Fullington is one of just few people in the world who know how to decipher them. (The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and the Russian stager Sergei Vikharev have both done reconstructions based on these notations.)

The question was, how would these steps, created in Imperial Russia decades before the invention of jazz, let alone movie musicals, fit in with the new setting?

“Looking at the steps in isolation, without any narrative context, I thought they seemed very transferable,” Fullington said. “They weren’t exotic in any way.”

Simple moves like chugging hops on one leg and “paddle steps,” which have an up-down feel like an oompah in music, recur throughout the ballet. “The choreography is deceptively simple,” Chan said, “and it’s used in a way that builds and builds, and passes from one group to another group.”

Fullington and Chan have combined the notated steps with Western-inspired gestures like thumbs tucked in belt loops and tipped cowboy hats. In the studio, Fullington focused on staging the steps, and Chan on clarifying the storytelling and mime. In the passages that were not notated, and for the Charleston at the end, Fullington has created new steps or used steps drawn from other Petipa ballets.

But perhaps the most important element in bridging the two worlds is the ballet’s score, as reimagined by the veteran orchestrator Larry Moore, whose work includes editing a 1989 reconstruction of Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy.” Fullington sent him a piano reduction of the Minkus score and other materials, with the request that he should, as Moore said, “make the score sound more like 1930 than like 1877.”

Moore mostly kept Minkus’s melodies, while “lovingly tarting up the orchestral material,” he said, adding all manner of sounds and countermelodies. The new orchestration includes castanets, maracas, whips, a washboard, a guitar, a celesta and three saxophones. “I’ve got them playing everything but the kitchen sink, ” he said.

His sources of inspiration included the piano pieces of Scott Joplin, the song “Red River Valley” and the sophisticated Hollywood sound of Robert Russell Bennett, who orchestrated classic works like “Girl Crazy” and “Kiss Me Kate.”

To give the music a stronger dance impulse Moore played around with the rhythms, creating, at various points, a tango and a beguine, and adding percussion throughout. It was also his idea to turn the finale into a raucous Charleston. “I wanted a big happy ending, where they’re all happily dancing around,” he said.

Indiana University’s ballet program, part of the Jacobs School of Music, is one of the few that could take on such an ambitious project. The score will be performed by one of the school’s six orchestras. All of the school’s 68 dancers are involved in the show, as are faculty and 20 students from the affiliated Jacobs Academy. The scenic and costume designers (Mark Smith and Camille Deering) are also in-house.

For the student-dancers, it has been an eye-opening experience. Used to more neoclassical, abstract works, they’ve had to adapt to the filigreed classical steps and detailed storytelling and mime of “La Bayadère.” “You can’t just act with your eyes,” Maya Jackson, a sophomore performing the role of Nikki in one of the casts, said in a telephone interview, “you have to use your whole body.”

Stanley Cannon, who is playing a cowboy, is enjoying something he doesn’t often get to do in classical ballets: being part of a male ensemble. But he’s also excited about the larger picture the production represents. “The coolest thing hands down about this has been seeing the future of ballet,” he said.

Or, as Chan put it, “how do we keep these works that are such an important part of our dance heritage alive, but without the parts that no longer serve us?”

Stepping Into the World of Dance

The choreographer Emma Portner, who has spent her career mixing genres and disciplines , comes to ballet with an eye on its sometimes calcified gender relations.

In Irish dance, precision is prized. But perfection is beside the point at Gayli , a series of L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly ceili classes during March at Mary’s Bar, a queer Irish pub in Brooklyn.

A childhood encounter with an American soldier in Iraq led Hussein Smko to become a dancer. Now the artist performs on New York stages .

“Deep River” is in many ways an apt title for a dance work by Alonzo King, a choreographer fixated on flow .

Robert Garland has held many positions at Dance Theater of Harlem over many years. At long last, he has caught the most prized title: artistic director .

Alexei Ratmansky, arguably the most important ballet choreographer today, has stepped into a new role at New York City Ballet  with a deeply personal first work  that reflected his Ukrainian roots.

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The 3-body problem is real, and it’s really unsolvable

Oh god don’t make me explain math

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Everybody seems to be talking about 3 Body Problem , the new Netflix series based on Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past book trilogy . Fewer people are talking about the two series’ namesake: The unsolvable physics problem of the same name.

This makes sense, because it’s confusing . In physics, the three-body problem attempts to find a way to predict the movements of three objects whose gravity interacts with each of the others — like three stars that are close together in space. Sounds simple enough, right? Yet I myself recently pulled up the Wikipedia article on the three-body problem and closed the tab in the same manner that a person might stagger away from a bright light. Apparently the Earth, sun, and moon are a three-body system? Are you telling me we don’t know how the moon moves ? Scientists have published multiple solutions for the three-body problem? Are you telling me Cixin Liu’s books are out of date?

All I’d wanted to know was why the problem was considered unsolvable, and now memories of my one semester of high school physics were swimming before my eyes like so many glowing doom numbers. However, despite my pains, I have readied several ways that we non-physicists can be confident that the three-body problem is, in fact, unsolvable.

Reason 1: This is a special definition of ‘unsolvable’

The three-body problem is extra confusing, because scientists are seemingly constantly finding new solutions to the three-body problem! They just don’t mean a one-solution-for-all solution. Such a formula does exist for a two-body system, and apparently Isaac Newton figured it out in 1687 . But systems with more than two bodies are, according to physicists, too chaotic (i.e., not in the sense of a child’s messy bedroom, but in the sense of “chaos theory”) to be corralled by a single solution.

When physicists say they have a new solution to the three-body problem, they mean that they’ve found a specific solution for three-body systems that have certain theoretical parameters. Don’t ask me to explain those parameters, because they’re all things like “the three masses are collinear at each instant” or “a zero angular momentum solution with three equal masses moving around a figure-eight shape.” But basically: By narrowing the focus of the problem to certain arrangements of three-body systems, physicists have been able to derive formulas that predict the movements of some of them, like in our solar system. The mass of the Earth and the sun create a “ restricted three-body problem ,” where a less-big body (in this case, the moon) moves under the influence of two massive ones (the Earth and the sun).

What physicists mean when they say the three-body problem has no solution is simply that there isn’t a one-formula-fits-all solution to every way that the gravity of three objects might cause those objects to move — which is exactly what Three-Body Problem bases its whole premise on.

Reason 2: 3 Body Problem picked an unsolved three-body system on purpose

Henri Poincaré’s research into a general solution to the three-body problem formed the basis of what would become known as chaos theory (you might know it from its co-starring role in Jurassic Park ). And 3 Body Problem itself isn’t about any old three-body system. It’s specifically about an extremely chaotic three-body system, the exact kind of arrangement of bodies that Poincaré was focused on when he showed that the problem is “unsolvable.”

[ Ed. note: The rest of this section includes some spoilers for 3 Body Problem .]

In both Liu’s books and Netflix’s 3 Body Problem , humanity faces an invasion by aliens (called Trisolarans in the English translation of the books, and San-Ti in the TV series) whose home solar system features three suns in a chaotic three-body relationship. It is a world where, unlike ours, the heavens are fundamentally unpredictable. Periods of icy cold give way to searing heat that give way to swings in gravity that turn into temporary reprieves that can never be trusted. The unpredictable nature of the San-Ti environment is the source of every detail of their physicality, their philosophy, and their desire to claim Earth for their own.

In other words, 3 Body Problem ’s three-body problem is unsolvable because Liu wanted to write a story with an unsolvable three-body system, so he chose one of the three-body systems for which we have not discovered a solution, and might never.

Reason 3: Scientists are still working on the three-body problem

Perhaps the best reason I can give you to believe that the three-body problem is real, and is really unsolvable, is that some scientists published a whole set of new solutions for specific three-body systems very recently .

If physicists are still working on the three-body problem, we can safely assume that it has not been solved. Scientists, after all, are the real experts. And I am definitely not.

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