"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Two mathematicians now say they’ve made progress on a very old unsolved math problem. The problem ...

Arnold’s work was in an area of mathematics that concerns all the different configurations a physical system like bouncing billiard balls or orbiting planets can take. These configurations are encoded ...

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 ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

Mathematics and physics share a close, reciprocal relationship. Mathematics offers the language and tools to describe physical phenomena, while physics drives the development of new mathematical ideas ...

Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to describe a family of rough, fragmented shapes that fall outside ...