Number 208 (Story #3), December 22, 1994 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein SOME OF THE EQUATIONS RELATED TO SUPERSYMMETRY THEORY have been solved exactly by Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and his colleague Nathan Seiberg of Rutgers. Supersymmetry theory seeks to incorporate all four known physical forces including gravity into a single mathematical framework. It does this by presuming a special relation between fermions (particles such as quarks with half-integral spin) and bosons (particles such as photons with an integer-valued spin). Although Witten's achievement addresses the subject of quark confinement---why the strong force operating between quarks actually increases as the quarks move apart---the chief beneficiaries of the new results will be mathematicians who work with multidimensional geometry. Harvard mathematician Clifford Taubes has said that Witten's work will speed up calculations and shorten proofs. (Science, 9 December 1994.)