Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

Now that pandemic restrictions are easing up, people are getting together again. But it’s been a while, so if you and your friends need some help breaking the ice, here’s a mathematical party game you ...

Like many of us, [Tim]’s seen online videos of circuit sculptures containing illuminated LED filaments. Unlike most of us, however, he went a step further by using graph theory to design glowing ...

For thousands of years, philosophers have pondered cardinality: knowing “how many.” Using a series of crude estimates, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes worked out the approximate number of ...

In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle ...

Do games have anything deeper to say about physics, or vice versa? Maybe. Most surprisingly, the connection might arise at the most fundamental level of all: quantum physics. —Chiu Fan Lee and Neil F.

A pole vaulter and three-time captain on Smith’s track and field team, Kerry Seekamp ’26 is fascinated by the intricacies of ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In ...