How bees, beer cans and big data all solve the same problem: not enough space. By Steven Strogatz Photo illustrations by Jens Mortensen Each installment of “Math, Revealed” starts with an object, ...

As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery. “There’s some instinct or ...

As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery. “There’s some instinct or ...

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made artificial intelligence more adaptable than ever before, but that comes with a drawback: lies. Generative AI tends to make things up, but ...

Here at PopMech, we love mind-bending math and logic puzzles, which is why we regularly recruit the sharpest minds in the world to concoct riddles that will test your critical thinking, mathematics, ...

Imagine placing oranges or tennis balls into a rigid container. How can the balls be arranged such that they occupy the largest volume fraction of the container, otherwise known as the largest packing ...

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 ...