A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

The first major progress on the rectangular peg problem was made in a proof from the late-1970s by Herbert Vaughan. The proof initiated a new way of thinking about the geometry of a rectangle and ...

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius ...

Second, he provided a formula for the maximum number of bits per second that can be reliably communicated in the face of noise, which he called the system’s capacity, C.This is the maximum rate at ...

Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical ...

Tunneling was not enough, Anderson argued in a 1958 paper.A disordered landscape of any dimension would “localize” a particle. The work went essentially unread for years, although it would eventually ...

Francis Su discusses how the community of mathematicians tends to exclude certain people.

Editor’s note: In February 2023, a team of physicists led by Norman Yao of Harvard University published a comment about the holographic wormhole experiment described in this article. After analyzing ...

In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly ...

I n the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic ...

In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial ...

One incentive might be that larger groups of cells can be harder for predators to eat. Independent work by Roberta Fisher at VU University Amsterdam in 2015 and Stefania Kapsetaki at Oxford in 2019 ...