In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental ...

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s ...

Paulina Rowińska is a science writer with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Before joining Quanta Magazine as a science writing fellow, she was an editorial intern at ...

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been a critical turning point for life on Earth. For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the ...