Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a ...

By combining the language of groups with that of geometry and linear algebra, Marius Sophus Lie created one of math’s most ...

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact ...

The supercollider is now being used to explore quantum phenomena, including a “magic” form of quantum entanglement.

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by ...

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms.

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize ...

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, ...

Tinkering at their desks with the mathematics of quantum space and time, physicists have discovered a puzzling conundrum. The arcane rules of quantum theory and gravity let them imagine many different ...

If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any animal, plant, fungus, bacterium or virus on Earth as though it were a spiral staircase, you would always find yourself turning ...

The mathematicians Günter Ziegler and Martin Aigner have spent the past 20 years collecting some of the most beautiful proofs in mathematics. Paul Erdős, the famously eccentric, peripatetic and ...

Glass is anything that’s rigid like a crystal, yet made of disordered molecules like a liquid. To understand why it exists, researchers are attempting to create the perfect, still-hypothetical “ideal ...