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 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers, in a surprise discovery, have found ...

More than a century after Srinivasa Ramanujan scribbled his astonishing formulas for π in notebooks in India and England, ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...

It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When it comes to describing the physical world, we can do it ...

For four decades, a quiet boundary in pure mathematics kept a powerful theorem locked inside the safe world of finite quantities. Now a new result known as Sebestyen’s theorem has pushed that boundary ...

In 1935, Albert Einstein, working with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, grappled with a possibility revealed by the new laws of quantum physics: that two particles could be entangled, or correlated, ...

The National Science Foundation awarded two University of Dayton mathematicians nearly $275,000 to research the building blocks of biological systems and the geometry of four-dimensional spaces. Both ...

Early in his new book, physics historian Graham Farmelo quotes Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J.: “We can eavesdrop on nature not ...