Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of ...

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation ...

Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with each of the others to create another common word. What is it? When the answer finally comes to you, it’ll likely feel ...

Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” ...

t started as a fantasy, then a promise — inspired by biology and animated by the ideas of physicists — and grew to become a powerful research tool. Now artificial intelligence has evolved into ...

It’s a universal fact that as any 3D object, from a Platonic sphere to a cell to an elephant, grows outward in all directions, its total surface area will increase more slowly than the space it ...

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

Paulina Rowińska is a science writer with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Before joining Quanta Magazine as a science writing fellow, she was an editorial intern at ...