The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ...

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. Her latest book is I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World.

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of ...

In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation ...

Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with each of the others to create another common word. What is it? When the answer finally comes to you, it’ll likely feel ...

The quest to find the longest-running simple computer program has identified a new champion. It’s physically impossible to write out the numbers involved using standard mathematical notation.

t started as a fantasy, then a promise — inspired by biology and animated by the ideas of physicists — and grew to become a powerful research tool. Now artificial intelligence has evolved into ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry. “Anomalous” heat flow, which at first ...

Geometry may have its origins thousands of years ago in ancient land surveying, but it has also had a surprising impact on modern physics. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Yang-Hui He explores ...

Joseph Howlett is a math writer for Quanta Magazine. His articles have been published Scientific American, The San Francisco Chronicle and Gizmodo, among other places. He has a Ph.D.