Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a ...

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum ...

Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to ...

Richard Green is a freelance mathematics writer and a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has a degree from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University ...

The year’s biggest computer science stories included a new understanding of large language models, and a breakthrough in being able to compute complex quantum systems. We look back at three of the ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. In the late 19th century, ...

A new proof reveals the answer to the decades-old “moving sofa” problem. It highlights how even the simplest optimization problems can have counterintuitive answers. If you’ve ever moved into a new ...

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences. By 1928, ...

The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the eminent mathematician David Hilbert announced a list of 23 key ...