In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental ...

Paulina Rowińska is a science writer with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Before joining Quanta Magazine as a science writing fellow, she was an editorial intern at ...

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. Imagine you’re holding ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the ...

The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development. In March, a group of ...