Knot theory is a branch of topology that has surprisingly practical applications, such as understanding how proteins coil DNA and how molecular structures remain stable. The theory’s central question: ...

Calculus of variations establishes a framework to determine the extrema of functionals—mappings from functions to real numbers—which has been pivotal in elucidating natural principles such as the ...

A new study addresses a foundational problem in the theory of driven quantum matter by extending the Středa formula to ...

Mathematicians have struggled to understand the moduli space of graphs. A new paper uses tools from physics to peek inside. “That’s a super hard problem. It’s amazing they were able to,” said Dan ...

An international team of researchers has identified a quantum counterpart to Bayes’ rule. The likelihood you assign to an ...

IT is only in quite recent times that mathematical methods have been applied in the social sciences or, indeed, in those fields, such as psychology, where the natural and the social sciences overlap.

Researchers have demonstrated that self-organization of neurons as they 'learn' follows a mathematical theory called the free energy principle. The principle accurately predicted how real neural ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Louisiana students ...

Discriminating among tectonic settings by the chemical composition of igneous rocks is a feasible method in geochemistry. In this study, the feasibility of using gabbroic rocks to discriminate among ...

At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most popular ideas have one thing in common: they begin from a mathematical framework that seeks to explain more things than our currently ...

Mathematical quirks of our universe have led some cosmologists to wonder whether the cosmos was actually born in a black hole ...

Pi Day (3/14) often comes with sweet treats; Square Root Day (4/4/16 or 5/5/25, for example) has a certain numerical rhyme.