The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is ...

Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a ...

By combining the language of groups with that of geometry and linear algebra, Marius Sophus Lie created one of math’s most ...

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact ...

The supercollider is now being used to explore quantum phenomena, including a “magic” form of quantum entanglement.

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize ...

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water. Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, ...

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 this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams ...

If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any animal, plant, fungus, bacterium or virus on Earth as though it were a spiral staircase, you would always find yourself turning ...

Watanabe invented a new way of distinguishing shapes on his way to solving the last open case of the Smale conjecture, a central question in topology about symmetries of the sphere. In a burst of work ...

The danger of having artificially intelligent machines do our bidding is that we might not be careful enough about what we wish for. The lines of code that animate these machines will inevitably lack ...