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

The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His ...

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important ...

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. Her latest book is I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World.

Encouraged by successes in understanding black holes, theoretical physicists are applying what they’ve learned to whole ...

Kellogg Stelle was a professor of physics at Imperial College London for decades until his death last month. In 1977, he developed a particle theory of gravity that’s renormalizable, but the theory’s ...

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.

Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe has a shape.

On its surface, the Kakeya conjecture is a simple statement about rotating needles. But it underlies a wealth of mathematics. The Quanta Newsletter ...

The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem. The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet ...

For decades, physicists have struggled to develop a quantum theory of gravity. But what if gravity — and space-time — are fundamentally classical? Most physicists expect that when we zoom in on the ...