A new study reveals that Srinivasa Ramanujan’s century-old formulas for calculating pi unexpectedly emerge within modern theories of critical phenomena, turbulence, and black holes. In school, many of ...

Most of us first hear about the irrational number π (pi)—rounded off as 3.14, with an infinite number of decimal digits—in ...

"Of all the equations of physics, perhaps the most magical is the Dirac equation." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. British ...

More than a hundred years ago, long before anyone imagined supercomputers or black hole ...

Black holes exist in our universe. That’s widely accepted today. Physicists have detected the X-rays emitted when black holes feed, analyzed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and even ...

Many books about science are meant to be pleasure reading. Such books attempt to convey the wonder and fascination and excitement of science, and ideally some of the substance as well. After all, good ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Navier-Stokes equations describe simple, everyday phenomena, like water flowing from a garden hose, yet they provide a million-dollar mathematical challenge. Physics contains equations that ...

For almost two centuries, mathematicians believed there was no general solution for certain high-degree polynomial equations. Now, two Australian researchers—Norman Wildberger and Dean Rubine—have ...