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 ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

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 ...

The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced ...

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. If there’s one law of physics ...

The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The ...

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...