Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology.For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous…

We all want to get back to our lives—go out for a drink, see a movie, hug our parents and grandparents, and bring our cities back to life. When will the virus be under control? And…

Colonel John Boyd was a legendary fighter pilot with the United States Air Force. As an instructor at the prestigious Fighter Weapons School, he became known as “40-second Boyd”…

Claudius Ptolemy’s monumental astronomy book, the Almagest, established a unified mathematical framework for computing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets at any time…

The only intelligent life forms we know of reside here on Earth. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to answer the question: “Are we alone?” The search for extraterrestrial…

Last year news came that Indian billionaire Gautam Adani was set to exploit Australian coal reserves. The deal, The New York Times reported, was the result of a successful campaign…

Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if you’ve been following the news, which lately has…

Scrabble is a volatile game. It’s not uncommon for underdogs to make tournament upsets. Why? Luck. It plays a large role in Scrabble, and efforts to remove it, by changing tile values,…

Few experiences on the road are more perplexing than phantom traffic jams. Most of us have experienced one: The vehicle ahead of you suddenly brakes, forcing you to brake, and making…

Mathematicians long wondered whether it’s possible to express the number 33 as the sum of three cubes—that is, whether the equation 33 = x³+ y³+ z³ has a solution. They knew…