Mathematics

Why do people cooperate? This isn’t a question anyone seriously asks. The answer is obvious: we cooperate because doing so is usually synergistic. It creates more benefit for less cost and makes our…

It's that time of year - the NCAA tournament, called "March Madness", when office pools all across the United States have people researching teams and reading predictions to try and optimize their…

How should scientists interpret their data? Emerging from their labs after days, weeks, months, even years spent measuring and recording, how do researchers draw conclusions about the results of…

The concept of randomness has intrigued great minds for as long as history of great thinkers has been recorded.  From the nature of wind to drunks running into lampposts on their way home,…

Researchers focusing on a new way to discuss statistical mechanics have modeled "World War Z", an oral history of the first zombie war, to explore how an "actual" zombie outbreak might play out in…

By Ker Than,  Inside Science (Inside Science) -- Opinions rarely form in a vacuum. People are heavily influenced by the opinions of others in their social networks, whether they be real or…

Optimization algorithms seek to find the minimum values of mathematical functions in engineering. It's how engineers evaluate design trade-offs, assess control systems and how people find patterns in…

Considering environmental effects such as a gravitational tidal force spread over a scale much larger than a galaxy cluster will be indispensable to explain the distribution and evolution of dark…

The sex ratio in your community may affect what you're looking for in a relationship. Shutterstock By Ryan Schacht, University of Utah and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, University of California, Davis…

Games have been test beds for new ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) since computers came on the scene and there have been significant milestones - Deep Blue sort of defeated Kasparov in chess and…