[fermenflo]

I don't remember if this is the exact paper but as united893 already posted, the paper was probably:

https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-...

Long story short: Imagine you have an object, place an ant on the surface of the object, and then instruct the ant to walk in a straight line forever. Will the ant ever end up in the same place it started (with the same initial direction)? If so, then it has formed a closed geodesic. For some objects, the answer is obvious. For a perfect sphere, the answer is always yes. In fact, any sphere-like object (imagine warping/contorting a sphere without tearing or poking holes in it) will always have at least 3 such closed geodesics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem_of_the_three_geodesics.

Miriam managed to construct an amazing formula that, when given the number of holes in an object, can give you the probability of forming a closed geodesic when starting from a random point in a random direction.

This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx-kAlEpiZk is a great video that goes over what I explained and a couple other great achievements of hers. Worth a watch.