Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is ...

Like physics, math has its own set of “fundamental particles”—the prime numbers, which can’t be broken down into smaller ...

Scientists found exotic prime numbers may play a role in black hole physics, revealing a surprising connection between number theory and the extreme environments of the universe.

Physicists at Boston University have achieved what amounts to a long-sought benchmark in quantum measurement: detecting the ...

The universe’s first moments after the Big Bang were strange beyond imagination. Now physicists have discovered they may have been even weirder than we thought, dominated by enormous, twisted knots of ...

Aaron Lauda has been exploring an area of mathematics that most physicists have seen little use for, wondering if it might have practical applications. In a twist even he didn’t expect, it turns out ...