A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

In mid-March, the mathematicians Joshua Greene and Andrew Lobb found themselves in the same situation: locked down and struggling to adjust while the COVID-19 pandemic grew outside their doors. They ...

Second, he provided a formula for the maximum number of bits per second that can be reliably communicated in the face of noise, which he called the system’s capacity, C.This is the maximum rate at ...

For Woodin, the dream is to build an inner model that truly approximates V and therefore includes all the large cardinals. He calls it “Ultimate L.”It might seem like a hopeless task — after all, ...

Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical ...

Francis Su discusses how the community of mathematicians tends to exclude certain people.

In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial ...

This simple procedure, as they later described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, rapidly caused the evolution of tiny clumps — yeasts that had evolved to stay attached to each ...

Dictionary of Duality . To see how two theories can secretly say the same things, you need a dictionary to translate between them. The rabbit-duck dictionary, for instance, would establish that “ear” ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...

Now, in a preprint released on November 8, the computer scientist Irit Dinur of the Weizmann Institute of Science and four mathematicians, Shai Evra, Ron Livne, Alex Lubotzky and Shahar Mozes, all at ...

Modern climate models take into account the complicated interaction and feedback between millions of variables. They do this by solving a system of equations representing the conservation of mass, ...