Baez called for the development of new mathematics — he called it “green” math — to better capture the workings of Earth’s biosphere and climate. For his part, he sought to apply category theory, a ...

More than 60,000 years ago, early humans in southern Africa were carving patterns onto ostrich eggshells—and new research shows these designs were far more sophisticated than previously believed. A ...

There is a rule in mathematics that feels so obvious it barely seems worth stating. Yet accepting it leads to objects with no size, spheres that duplicate themselves, and sets that cannot be measured ...

Visually, the “Klein bottle” doesn’t seem all that impressive. On first glance it looks like a trendy Japandi-style vase. And yet it has fascinated mathematicians for more than 140 years. To ...

When a delicate object crashes onto the floor, most people expect it to shatter into several pieces. What they might not know, however, is that the sizes of those fragments—whether from a broken plate ...

Thirty years ago today, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release announcing JavaScript, an object scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications ...

Experts have confirmed that the mysterious object hurtling towards us, previously dubbed A11pl3Z, is an "interstellar object." The cosmic interloper, officially named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third of ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...