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 ...

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 ...

At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists ...

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 ...

This article is the first part of a series about quantum field theory published by Quanta Magazine. Other stories in the series can be found here. Over the past century, quantum field theory has ...