In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation ...

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

After more than three centuries, a geometry problem that originated with a royal bet has been solved. Imagine you’re holding ...

Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental ...

Paulina Rowińska is a science writer with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Imperial College London. Before joining Quanta Magazine as a science writing fellow, she was an editorial intern at ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes have only a small handful of distinguishing characteristics. Quantum theory implies they may have more. Now an experimental search finds that any ...

Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them. The Quanta Newsletter ...

If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a slippery concept. Perhaps one day there’s an accident or road closure ...