Mathematics

Mathematical biologist Dr. Jamie Wood wanted to know how birds collectively negotiate man-made obstacles such as wind turbines which lie in their flight paths and that led to a research project with…

There are those who believed that B.B. King wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar player, including the man himself. In a recent interview he said: I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never…

When ants go exploring in search of food they end up choosing collective routes that fit statistical distributions of probability, according to a team of mathematicians who analyzed the trails of a…

It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces - but that was not because of a limitation of our brains.  Instead, it's likely that even the…

There is not the slightest doubt that the the universe is real. It is three-dimensional. But one popular alternative notion has been the "holographic principle", which asserts that a mathematical…

The famous sunspots on the surface of the Earth's star result from strong magnetic fields. Their numbers are an important indicator of the state of activity on the Sun. At the Institute of Nuclear…

One cornerstone of the Science 2.0 approach is the framework for making Big Data manageable. In fields from physics to biology, it's no longer a question of obtaining data, but managing it in ways…

By Peter Gwynne, Inside Science – From raisins to fingerprints, and from tree bark to the surface of the brain, wrinkles appear throughout nature. But scientists have struggled to explain how…

Many people have heard of the Golden Ratio, a ratio that is the midpoint between asymmetry and symmetry - when "the whole is to the larger as the larger is to the smaller". In numerical terms,…

Pi Day – on March 14th – will be particularly memorable this year: the date can be written 3/14 by those who opt for the month then day format, which is Pi to two decimal places, 3.14. If you…