Long before silicon chips or copper wiring, the Inca built something that functioned remarkably like an information system. This device of knotted cotton and camelid fiber, long thought by researchers ...

When is a billiard ball not a billiard ball? When mathematicians get involved and view a popular game as a model computer.

Her challenge focused on the deep connections between polynomial equations such as 4 x2 – 1 = 0 and the symmetries buried in their solutions. Within a few short months of the conference, by ...

The surprising real-world applications of high-dimensional sphere packing and the 48-year-old barrier that OpenAI just broke ...

Urban heat islands are a solvable data problem: this piece shows how to combine free satellite imagery, standard ...

This puzzle is the starting point for an area of math called sphere packing. After pondering the two-dimensional case on a tabletop, it’s natural to hop to three dimensions (picture oranges stacked ...

Physicists and mathematicians are going beyond the classic equations of fluid dynamics to understand turbulence — often with the help of AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing—and with it, the promise of solving some of academia's toughest problems.

OpenAI beat humans to solving the Navier-Stokes problem, but mathematicians say the AI's solution isn't telling them much.