We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
The painstaking process of formalization to verify proofs is starting to surge thanks to AI. That could radically change the way people do math.
Mathematician Richard Elwes surveys googology, the study of enormous numbers, in a new book.
A molecule made of carbon and chlorine is half as twisty as the paper loops common in math classes.
Kids with math learning disabilities process number symbols differently than quantities shown as dots — and it shows up in MRIs.
Quasicrystals are orderly structures that never repeat. Scientists just showed they can exist in space and time.
Flower designs on 8,000-year-old Mesopotamian pots reveal a “mathematical knowledge” perhaps developed to share land and crops, archaeologists say.
Math and physics explain the anguish of a golf ball that zings around the rim of the hole instead of falling in.
Over the last half 50 years, fractals have challenged ideas about geometry and pushed math, science and technology into unexpected areas.
From jury duty to tax audits, randomness plays a big role. Scientists used quantum physics to build a system that ensures those number draws can’t be gamed.
