Archive

The four-color problem is simple to explain, but its complex proof continues to be both celebrated and despised.

There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants.

The prize-winning geometer feels most fulfilled when exploring the fertile ground where constraint meets creation.

Learn why the quadratic formula works and why quadratics are easier to solve than cubics.

Last fall, a team of physicists announced that they had teleported a qubit through a holographic wormhole in a quantum computer. Now another group suggests that’s not quite what happened.

The American researcher was recognized for his central role in inventing, standardizing and commercializing the ubiquitous networking technology.

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.