For every popular list of unsolved problems, there are scholars and students dreaming of -- and working towards -- solving the puzzles they contain. Many search for creative solutions, only to reach ...

In physics, the conundrum known as the 'few-body problem,' how three or more interacting particles behave, has bedeviled scientists for centuries. Equations that describe the physics of few-body ...

Tessellations aren’t just eye-catching patterns—they can be used to crack complex mathematical problems. By repeatedly reflecting shapes to tile a surface, researchers uncovered a method that links ...

A pendulum in motion can either swing from side to side or turn in a continuous circle. The point at which it goes from one type of motion to the other is called the separatrix, and this can be ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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