Archive

Can mathematics handle things that are essentially the same without being exactly equal? Category theorist Eugenia Cheng and host Steven Strogatz discuss the power and pleasures of abstraction.

For decades, mathematicians have been inching forward on a problem about which sets contain evenly spaced patterns of three numbers. Last month, two computer scientists blew past all of those results.

A survey of prehistoric bones reveals that T. rex and some of its cousins had more than one way to reach enormous sizes. Evolution may have preserved that variation in modern animals too.

Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors.

In a recent paper, two mathematicians showed that a particular pattern is unavoidable when fractions are categorized.

The most comprehensive survey of how we share our microbiomes suggests a new way of thinking about the risks of developing some diseases that aren’t usually considered contagious.

Cosmologists are using secondary signatures from the cosmic microwave background to map the universe’s hidden matter.

Arvind Narayanan uses quantitative methods to expose and correct the misuse of quantitative methods.

Using “refreshingly old” tools, mathematicians resolved a 50-year-old conjecture about how to categorize important functions called modular forms, with consequences for number theory and theoretical physics.