Cora Dvorkin discovered new possibilities for what dark matter could be. Now she’s devising unorthodox ways to identify it.

For almost a century, the anonymous members of Nicolas Bourbaki have written books intended as pure expressions of mathematical thought.

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work.

The newly-measured rate of a key nuclear fusion process from the Big Bang matches the picture of the universe 380,000 years later.

It has been thought of as many things: a pointlike object, an excitation of a field, a speck of pure math that has cut into reality. But never has physicists’

Even genes essential for life can be caught in an evolutionary arms race that forces them to change or be replaced.

Bryna Kra searches for the patterns in sequences of numbers that explain how complicated dynamical systems evolve over time.

Struggling with math problems that can't be solved helps us better understand the ones we can.

An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together.

A numerical puzzle, a geometric puzzle and a game of random patterns — all with connections to the legendary mathematician — elicited an enthusiastic response from readers.

Physicists plan to leave no stone unturned, checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even

Has physics reached the limits of what we can discover — or are the possibilities only just beginning?

An unorthodox symbiotic theory about the origin of eukaryotes’ defining characteristic may soon be put to the test.

At 21, Ashwin Sah has produced a body of work that senior mathematicians say is nearly unprecedented for a college student.

In three bursts of adaptive change, one species of cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika gave rise to hundreds.

A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant, killing hopes for a new force of nature.

The result highlights a fundamental tension: Either the rules of quantum mechanics don’t always apply, or at least one basic assumption about reality must be

Jelani Nelson designs clever algorithms that only have to remember slivers of massive data sets. He also teaches kids in Ethiopia how to code.

The simple insight that most changes are random had a profound effect on genetics, evolution and ecology.

Mathematicians have long pondered the reach of a grazing goat tied to a fence, only finding approximate answers until now.

The goal of the “busy beaver” game is to find the longest-running computer program. Its pursuit has surprising connections to some of the most profound