On Tuesday, Scientific American turns 167 years old. It doesn't exactly look like the kind of anniversary we usually celebrate, with our decimal normative number system that overvalues ending zeroes and fives, but 167 is a pretty neat number...
William Thurston, whose geometrization conjecture changed the fields of geometry and topology and whose approach to mathematics and mathematics education has reverberated throughout the mathematical world, died on August 21 following a battle with cancer...
Annual conference shines a spotlight on mathematical art and artistic mathematics
Last May, a University of Alabama graduate student was the first person to collect an oblong rock snail in over 70 years. The species, Leptoxis compacta , hadn't been observed since 1933 and was declared extinct in 2000...
A new study fans the flames in the ongoing debate over whether or not to get tested
A new spray-on battery could convert any object into an electricity-storage device
In an opinion piece for the New York Times on Sunday, political science professor Andrew Hacker asks, "Is Algebra Necessary?" and answers, "No." It's not just algebra: geometry and calculus are on the chopping block, too...
Gun-control laws have changed rapidly in recent years; how they affect crime rates is hotly debated
I hope you're ready for your big Pi Approximation Day party tomorrow. You might have observed Pi Day on March 14. It gets its name from 3.14, the first three digits of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter...
Last Wednesday night I attended a "Math Encounters" program co-sponsored by the soon-to-open Museum of Math in New York City. In 2008, Glen Whitney, a mathematician and former hedge fund manager, was dismayed to learn that a small museum dedicated to math in Long Island was closing...
Chances are, you heard this month about the discovery of a tiny fundamental physics particle that may be the long-sought Higgs boson. The phrase five-sigma was tossed about by scientists to describe the strength of the discovery...
They don't wear white coats or protective goggles, but mathematicians around the country have captured the imagination of students in ever more creative ways
The lithium ion battery is applied in layers, each of which is an aerosol paint, leading to possible solar-energy applications
R. A. Dickey is one of the hottest topics in Major League Baseball right now. This right-handed Mets pitcher's two most recent outings have been one-hitters, he has a league-leading 11–1 win-loss record, and he’s one of the league’s only knuckleballers...
The Inamori Foundation announced this year’s Kyoto Prizes today. Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi won the prize in Basic Science, and Dr. Ivan Edward Sutherland won the prize in Advanced Technology.Ohsumi, a professor at the Frontier Research Center of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, won for his pioneering work on autophagy...
A layered design would split two key aspects of a light wave, enabling electromagnetic energy to pull objects
Audience responses may help composers fine-tune their works over time
