Mathematics

A comprehensive game plan and strategic tactics are critical to winning soccer, but how much does a team’s unpredictability in moving the soccer ball around the pitch matter? In a new article published in PLOS […]

Probability underpins AI, cryptography and statistics. However, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means.”This post was originally […]

Why do some systems collapse suddenly after what seems like a minor disturbance? A single transmission line failure can cascade into widespread blackouts. A delayed shipment can ripple through a global supply chain, emptying store […]

The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a prestigious competition featuring talented high school students from around the world, in which competitors solve complicated mathematical problems. Geometry problems from these kinds of competitions—in particular, the formal […]

A mystery novel, a history book, and a fantasy epic may have little in common in plot or style. But count the words inside them and a strange regularity appears: many new words show up […]

The amount and accuracy of passing in the game of soccer—called football across much of the world—has climbed in recent years, according to new research. The average passing volume, pass accuracy, and the percentage of […]

Artificial intelligence has attained an impressive series of feats—solving problems from the International Math Olympiad, conducting encyclopedic surveys of academic literature, and even finding solutions to some longstanding research questions. Yet these systems largely remain […]

Hyesang Chang and colleagues, from Stanford University, explored why some children struggle to learn math compared to their peers in a new JNeurosci paper. Children selected which numbers were bigger than others across different trials, […]

Here’s a statistical challenge worthy of a grandmaster: How do you create an accurate ranking system when the best players usually don’t win? This is the conundrum of elite chess. The stronger the players, the […]

Mathematics, like many other scientific endeavors, is increasingly using artificial intelligence. Of course, math is the backbone of AI, but mathematicians are also turning to these tools for tasks like literature searches and checking manuscripts […]