Mathematics

The Ten Best Science Books of 2018

These titles explore the wide-ranging implications of new discoveries and experiments, while grounding them in historical context

Extragalactic Background Light

This Is How Much Starlight the Universe Has Produced

4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 photons over 13.7 billion years

The Magformers Sky Track was a favorite for testers.

The Ten Best STEM Toys to Give as Gifts This Year

Experts and kids of all ages recommend these tech toys, which inspire year-round curiosity

A silica sphere with a radius of 50 nanometers is trapped levitating in a beam of light.

Optical Tweezers Give Scientists a Tool to Test the Laws of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum superposition is one of the great mysteries of physics—a mass existing in two states at once—and scientists hope to probe the phenomenon

A Mobius strip.

The Mathematical Madness of Möbius Strips and Other One-Sided Objects

The discovery of the Möbius strip in the mid-19th century launched a brand new field of mathematics: topology

A few pages from the recently digitized codex.

See Leonardo da Vinci's Genius Yourself in These Newly Digitized Sketches

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has made ultra high-resolution scans of two codices available online

Fields Medal recipients, from L to R: Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli, Akshay Venkatesh, Peter Scholze

This Year’s Fields Medal Winners Include a Kurdish Refugee and a 30-Year-Old Professor

Peter Scholze, Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli and Akshay Venkatesh named recipients of award often described as the Nobel Prize for mathematics

This shape, dubbed the scutoid, had no name until researchers found it while modeling how skin cells pack together.

Introducing the Scutoid, Geometry's Newest Shape

The scutoid allows skin cells to remain packed tightly together even over curved surfaces

Math in yarn

What Knitting Can Teach You About Math

In this professor's class, there are no calculators. Instead, students learn advanced math by drawing pictures, playing with beach balls—and knitting

Thermodynamics holds the answers to your wildest campfire dreams.

The Scientific Quest For the Perfect S’more

A trial by fire

The Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder

Study Suggests There's No Limit on Longevity, But Getting Super Old Is Still Tough

After the age of 105, the odds of dying plateau, meaning it's possible to live beyond the current record of 123 years

Australian researchers have shown that bees can distinguish nothing from various positive numbers.

Bees May Understand Zero, a Concept That Took Humans Millennia to Grasp

If the finding is true, they'd be the first invertebrates to join an elite club that includes primates, dolphins and parrots

Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian.

The 18th-Century Lady Mathematician Who Loved Calculus and God

After writing a groundbreaking math textbook, Maria Agnesi quit math for good

Artists and poets have long been inspired by the mathematical patterns found in nature—for instance, the remarkable fact that a sunflower's seeds follow the Fibonacci sequence. But there are myriad other ways that the realms of poetry and mathematics can intersect.

How Poetry and Math Intersect

Both require economy and precision—and each perspective can enhance the other

Primes still have the power to surprise.

Why Prime Numbers Still Surprise and Mystify Mathematicians

2300 years later, new patterns continue to show up in these indivisible tricksters

Small differences account for a shooter’s consistency.

The Math Behind the Perfect Free Throw

A basketball computer program simulates millions of trajectories in search of the ideal shot

Is the Fall Equinox the Secret to the Pyramids' Near-Perfect Alignment?

One engineer says yes

The Olympic Flame was lit from the sun's rays using a parabolic mirror, during the final dress rehearsal for the lighting ceremony at Ancient Olympia, in southwestern Greece, on Monday, Oct. 23, 2017.

Your Burning Questions About the Olympic Torch, Answered

Curious minds will want to know that the blaze is lit not with matches or a lighter, but using a method that dates to Ancient Greece

Every dazzling jump on the ice—like Yuzuru Hanyu's quadruple Lutz at the 2017 Grand Prix of Figure Skating in Moscow, Russia—requires a mastery of balance, rotational speed and angular momentum.

How Physics Keeps Figure Skaters Gracefully Aloft

Every twist, turn and jump relies on a mastery of complex physical forces

This Is the Largest Known Prime Number Yet

The newly discovered prime is 23 million digits long

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