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 ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of ...

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.

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

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

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

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 ...

Fifty years ago, Paul Erdős and two other mathematicians came up with a graph theory problem that they thought they might solve on the spot. A team of mathematicians has finally settled it. In the ...

Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself. In 2013, a masters student in physics named Paul Erker went ...

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...