Science
How Writing Changes Mathematical Thought
David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-buildi...
In Math, Rigor Is Vital. But Are Digitized Proofs Ta...
The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one ma...
Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Ever...
Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever ...
The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way To Keep Time
Off the coast of Japan, biologists netted a pea-size jellyfish with an unusua...
Quantum Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award
Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard were recognized for their foundational wo...
The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere
The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. N...
Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small...
The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating...
Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made o...
Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astri...
Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines
Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nu...
New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runne...
A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to...
Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better P...
Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores whether applied category theory can be “...
What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the St...
Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate abo...
Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues ...
Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can ...
The Man Who Stole Infinity
In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infin...
How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?
Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Som...
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines...
The planet is getting hotter, but one factor in particular makes it hard to t...
