The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to be equivalent to many complex mathematical ...

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further.

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals. “Not reliably,” Hurst said. “I don’t think it’s totally ...

Baez called for the development of new mathematics — he called it “green” math — to better capture the workings of Earth’s biosphere and climate. For his part, he sought to apply category theory, a ...

The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between resources such as time and memory. Is the inside of a vision model at all like a ...

According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes have only a small handful of distinguishing characteristics. Quantum theory implies they may have more. Now an experimental search finds that any ...

Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find ...

It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A broad new method can help settle this ancient question.

Two leading candidates for a “theory of everything,” long thought to be incompatible, may be two sides of the same coin. Explore the deepest mysteries at the frontier of fundamental physics, and the ...