If two people pick alternate slices from a pizza that has been cut unevenly from an off-centre point, common sense suggests ...

Imagine that you want to know the most efficient way to make a torus—a doughnut-shaped mathematical object—from origami paper. Instead of seeming almost perfectly smooth, the torus that you envision ...

Frustrated by the AI industry’s claims of proving math results without offering transparency, a team of leading academics has ...

Right now, molecules in the air are moving around you in chaotic and unpredictable ways. To make sense of such systems, physicists use a law known as the Boltzmann distribution, which, rather than ...

A creeping cynicism about elections, including the recent Bihar outcome, had begun to seriously afflict me after Assembly polls in Tripura in 2018. Covering elections over decades had caused personal ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was ...

The White House’s recent executive orders on artificial intelligence and the launch of America’s AI Action Plan have made one thing clear: The United States intends to lead the world in AI. To be sure ...

This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

In a digital era plagued by growing privacy concerns and eroding institutional trust, the power to prove something without disclosing sensitive data is not merely an academic exercise—it's a ...

THE opening sentence of the Preface—“The author has attempted to bring together all the well-known theorems and examples connected with Harmonics, Anharmonics, Involution, Projection (including ...

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources. Cory Benfield discusses the evolution of ...

Crows are able to look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don't, according to a provocative new study. It's the first ...