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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

Some mathematical patterns are so subtle you could search for a lifetime and never find them. Others are so common that they seem impossible to avoid. A new proof by Sarah Peluse of the University of ...

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 ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt ...

Is the universe infinite, Aristotle asked in 350 BCE, “or is this an impossibility? The decision … is … all-important to our search for the truth.” The Greek ...

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 ...

Charlie Wood is a staff writer covering physics at Quanta Magazine. His articles about advances in the physical sciences both on and off the planet have appeared in Popular Science… ...