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

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental ...

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s ...

Paulina Rowińska is a science writer with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Before joining Quanta Magazine as a science writing fellow, she was an editorial intern at ...

A series of new papers describes how to fully characterize key dynamical systems with relatively little data. The Quanta Newsletter ...

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. The AI ...

According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes have only a small handful of distinguishing characteristics. Quantum theory implies they may have more. Now an experimental search finds that any ...

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one ...

In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has ...