Abstract
One year ago, while much of the world was preparing to celebrate Christmas, physicists Ed Witten and Nathan Seiberg gave their own special gift to the world. They reduced an entire field of mathematics down to a single short paper. For decades mathematicians had been stymied in their attempts to describe physics phenomena that require four-dimensional space. Their equations seemed impossible to solve, even with the aid of super computers. But a pair of super brains did it. Witten and Seiberg transformed these extremely complex equations into simple ones, almost as simple as the ordinary calculus equations undergraduates work on in their classes.