Archive

A numerical puzzle, a geometric puzzle and a game of random patterns — all with connections to the legendary mathematician — elicited an enthusiastic response from readers.

An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together.

Struggling with math problems that can’t be solved helps us better understand the ones we can.

Bryna Kra searches for the patterns in sequences of numbers that explain how complicated dynamical systems evolve over time.

Even genes essential for life can be caught in an evolutionary arms race that forces them to change or be replaced.

It has been thought of as many things: a pointlike object, an excitation of a field, a speck of pure math that has cut into reality. But never has physicists’ conception of a particle changed more than it is changing now.

The newly-measured rate of a key nuclear fusion process from the Big Bang matches the picture of the universe 380,000 years later.

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.

For almost a century, the anonymous members of Nicolas Bourbaki have written books intended as pure expressions of mathematical thought.