Explainers

The relationships among the properties of flexible shapes have fascinated mathematicians for centuries.

Today’s information age is only possible thanks to the groundbreaking work of a lone genius.

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory.

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Symplectic geometry is a relatively new field with implications for much of modern mathematics. Here’s what it’s all about.

Why do mathematicians enjoy proving the same results in different ways?

Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change.

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences.

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.