Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...

Many books about science are meant to be pleasure reading. Such books attempt to convey the wonder and fascination and excitement of science, and ideally some of the substance as well. After all, good ...

More than a century before quantum mechanics was born, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton stumbled onto an idea that would quietly foreshadow one of the deepest truths in physics. While ...

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers, in a surprise discovery, have found ...

Black holes exist in our universe. That’s widely accepted today. Physicists have detected the X-rays emitted when black holes feed, analyzed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and even ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical ...

It’s formatted to confuse people, and there are no interesting underlying concepts. By Kenneth Chang Math can be useful. It can also be elegant, even beautiful — a word you’ll often hear ...

An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics. Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most ...