The idea of a species is fundamental to the way that many people understand the structure of life on Earth. But ask 10 ...

The giant holes in galaxies’ centers shouldn’t be able to merge, yet merge they do. Scientists suggest that an unusual form ...

Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the ...

Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates ...

A new proof about prime numbers illuminates the subtle relationship between addition and multiplication — and raises hopes ...

Though they live only a few hours before dividing, bacteria can anticipate the approach of cold weather and prepare for it.

It’s hard to measure water from a fire hose while it’s hitting you in the face. In a sense, that’s the challenge of analyzing streaming data, which comes at us in a torrent and never lets up. If ...

Landmark results in Ramsey theory and a remarkably simple aperiodic tile capped a year of mathematical delight and discovery. The Quanta Newsletter ...

The work — the first-ever limit on how many whole numbers can be written as the sum of two cubed fractions — makes significant headway on “a recurring embarrassment for number theorists.” Wei Ho, the ...