In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the English-professor characters play a game called "Humiliation," where they take turns admitting classic works of literature that they haven't ...

It might sound strange to think about physics (which often involves a lot of theory and hypotheticals) helping people solve mathematics problems. However, physics follows many math patterns very ...

It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

Last month, six Cornell faculty members received the Simons Fellowship, which provides funding for a research leave. Three received the Theoretical Physics fellowship and three received the ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

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 ...

You will never be able to prove every mathematical truth. For me, this incompleteness theorem, discovered by Kurt Gödel, is one of the most incredible results in mathematics. It may not surprise ...

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 ...

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 ...