Column
- Computing
Social Networking for Zebras
Scientists are developing a new branch of network theory to understand zebra communities.
- Math
A Video That’s Worth a Million Words
Award-winning video reveals the simplicity and beauty of an abstract mathematical tool.
- Math
A Video That’s Worth a Million Words
Award-winning video reveals the simplicity and beauty of an abstract mathematical tool.
- Math
Good Stories, Good Math
Young children who show sophisticated story-telling skills go on to demonstrate greater mathematical ability.
- Math
Math on Fire
A supercomputer model fed by real-time data is beginning to make sense of the seemingly unpredictable movement of wildfires.
- Math
Mathematical Fortune-Telling
A researcher uses game theory to predict the outcome of political and business challenges, including the current dispute with Iran over nuclear technology.
- Humans
The Ignobility of Wrinkles
A theoretical study of the way skin, apple peel, and bedsheets wrinkle has won this year's Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Math
A Tangled Tale
A piece of string tumbled over and over quickly develops knots, explaining why your headphone cords are always in a tangle.
- Math
A Prayer for Archimedes
A long-lost work by Archimedes shows his subtle grasp of the notion of infinity, and how close he was to developing calculus.
- Math
Beating the Bush for Patterns
Across some arid landscapes, sparse vegetation grows in fractal patterns that hold clues to its resilience.
- Math
The Essence of Group Conflict
Eruptions of open conflict between ethnic or religious groups have a lot to do with the way communities are geographically distributed.
- Math
Separate Is Never Equal
Economic forces alone can explain why social segregation leads to inequalities in wealth and achievement.
