Mathematics

From the daily weather forecast to a baseball player’s batting average to an individual’s risk of developing lung cancer, understanding statistics can help people in the United States navigate their lives, according to Mark Ramos, […]

It took nearly 15 years, researchers around the world and enough computing power to search through a universe of possibilities to answer one question: Who goes first?This post was originally published on this site

Humpty Dumpty had all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, but it wasn’t enough to put him back together again. This raises the question: How many horses and men did he actually need?This […]

Latin squares are arrangements of symbols in a grid in which every symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. These symbol arrangements, which were first studied more than three centuries ago, are now […]

A vaccine only protects a whole community if enough people get it, including those who would stay safe anyway once their neighbors are covered. The same tension runs through climate action and social movements: The […]

In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value […]

A little over a week ago, artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced 10 advances in mathematics and computer science made with its as-yet-unreleased model Astra. The discoveries cover a wide range of mathematical fields, including geometry, […]

As consumers, we are constantly making choices about things like what to eat at a restaurant, what clothing to buy at a store and the type of car we’d like to purchase, and so much […]

Mathematicians have shown that completely fair elections are—in a sense—impossible. No electoral system can guarantee both that local votes translate directly into local seats and that total seat distribution matches overall vote shares—not without an […]

If you’ve ever tried to read a scientific paper, you’ve almost certainly run into a p-value. And if you found it confusing, you’re in good company: Plenty of working scientists misunderstand it too.This post was […]