Why do we insist that our god be infinite? Why would being bound in a nutshell world give us bad dreams? Why do we fear the cloister more than the agora? Longing and love have always “the expansion of ...

For all of the recent strides we’ve made in the math world—like a supercomputer finally solving the Sum of Three Cubes problem that puzzled mathematicians for 65 years—we’re forever crunching ...

The infinite hotel paradox imagines a hotel with endless rooms that somehow runs out of space. Even when new guests arrive, the manager can always make room—until the logic collapses under its own ...

A seemingly impossible math puzzle, discovered stuck to a tree by a passing hiker, has left the internet well and truly stumped. Despite living in an increasingly digital world, math remains something ...

Math is always reinventing itself. In the late 19th century, its foundations were still shaky, its definitions and assumptions vague and uncertain. Mathematicians spent decades fixing the problem, ...

The recently discovered “hat” aperiodic monotile admits tilings of the plane, but none that are periodic [SMKGS23]. This polygon settles the question of whether a single shape—a closed topological ...

The computer scientist Erik Demaine and his artist and computer scientist father, Martin Demaine, have been pushing the limits of paper folding for years. Their intricate origami sculptures are part ...

Since ancient Greece, researchers have tried to isolate special rational points on curves. Now they have the first ever formula that applies uniformly to all curves ...