The Best Articles in Math

It has been thought of as many things: a pointlike object, an excitation of a field, a speck of pure math that has cut into reality. But never has physicists’ conception of a particle changed more…

If a shape has equal sides with 90 degree angles between them then it's a square, right? Well, not quite...

If you’ve ever tripped up over the term ‘Bayesian’ while reading up on data or tech, fear not. Strip away the jargon and notation, and even the mathematics-averse can make sense of the simple yet…

Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game.

When a theory breaks, you learn how to build it better.

«ASK WEIRD QUESTIONS Einstein had a wild imagination. He asked himself questions like: What would he feel if he rode an elevator through outer space? What would he see if he chased a beam of light?»

Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach.

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

On the 85th anniversary of his death, a look back at the legacy of Nikolai Kondratiev and its implications for the coming age of GenAI.

A compilation of my Raymarching and Signed Distance Field learnings and work. In it, I teach you how to leverage those techniques along with lighting models, smoothmin, soft shadows, and some math to create beautiful 3D raymarched scenes ranging from abstract shapes to infinite realistic-looking landscapes.

Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. Our first real clues are a handful of curious, carved bones dating from the final few millennia of the three-​million…

Transcendental numbers include famous examples like e and π, but it took mathematicians centuries to understand them.

One student’s desire to get out of a final exam led to the ubiquitous algorithm that shrinks data without sacrificing information.

If your eyes have ever been drawn to the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the texture of a pineapple, or the scales of a pinecone, then you have unknowingly witnessed brilliant examples of…

It’s been known for thousands of years that the primes go on forever, but new proofs give fresh insights into how theorems depend on one another.

Making history with 42 digits, scientists at Paderborn University and KU Leuven have unlocked a decades-old mystery of mathematics with the so-called ninth Dedekind number.

One of the major milestones of our early childhoods comes when we learn, for the first time, how to successfully tie our own shoes. As most of us learned, there are three key steps to making that…

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

Rhythm plays an important role in how we perceive — and connect with — the world.

All infinities go on forever, so how is it possible for some infinities to be larger than others? The mathematician Justin Moore discusses the mysteries of infinity with Steven Strogatz.

The quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with surveillance capitalism but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the 19th century.

«Emerging experimental psychology laboratories wanted to create a new kind of human being: quantifiable, calculable, and predictable.»