For Mr. Santos, math can also inspire ideas about structures that have already been built — a new way to see and appreciate the world. Inspired by this idea, The New York Times created a virtual tour ...

How would you go about answering the question “How many people have ever lived on this planet?” If you type that into Google or an artificial intelligence chatbot, you’ll get an answer pretty ...

Alexander Grothendieck was a titan in his field, making deep connections that fuelled a revolution in mathematics, before giving it all up and disappearing. Jacob Aron explores what his work meant ...

In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

The plastics industry is in flux, as there is an increasing push to replace petroleum-based materials with sustainable alternatives. But sustainability alone is not enough. Bio-based plastics need to ...

The least likely fields to be automated have significant human-to-human interaction. In terms of health care practitioners, for example, SHRM found only 3% of jobs had at least 50% automation and no ...

Numbers are all around us. In the morning, we wake up to an alarm that tells us it's time to get out of bed. When deciding what to wear, we often check the temperature outside. We count out the ...

Using a relatively young theory, a team of mathematicians has started to answer questions whose roots lie at the very beginning of mathematics.

The Parallel-R1 framework uses reinforcement learning to teach models how to explore multiple reasoning paths at once, leading to more robust and accurate problem-solving.