With Simon DeDeo on cosmic microwaves and crime.

From Death Star to Hogwarts, pop culture structures are as every bit iconic as the characters. How much would they cost to build in real life? We estimate the costs of five iconic structures.

Is our reality, including its forces and particles, based on the strange properties of numbers with eight dimensions called "octonions"? A physicist thinks so, having found a way to expand 40-year-old research to reach surprising new directions. First, a brief history of numbers.

Bluffing still matters, but the best players now depend on math theory.

A mathematical equation reveals there is just one way to stop a zombie apocalypse, and that is with human intervention. Apparently, humans can't coexist with the walking dead, says a mathematician.

For Peter Turchin, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the stand-off was predictable. He is one of a small group of people applying the mathematics of complex systems to political instability. They have been anticipating events just like this – and they say that if we don't find some way to respond to the warning signs and change course, things are bound to get a lot worse before they get better.

This week, with a paper published on the online academic research site ArXiv.org, Backstrom revealed one of the recent fruits of his labor: an experimental algorithm that analyzes your personal network of friends, seeking to identify your strongest relationships. Developed alongside his former Cornell thesis adviser, Jon Kleinberg, the algorithm is strong enough to independently identity your spouse or romantic partner and even predict when you’re headed for a breakup.

You might think the principal coder behind PolitiFact took naturally to math. You'd be wrong.

Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don’t realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.

When it comes to mathematics, reading and science, young people in Shanghai are the best in the world, according to a global education survey released Tuesday.

Really simple fractals implemented in JS.

Interesting geometric result

An assortment of mathematical marvels.

Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur, philanthropist and self-described “failed physicist” who made a splash two years ago when he began handing out lavish cash awards to scientists, is expanding the universe of his largess again: He and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced Thursday night that they would begin handing out $3 million awards to mathematicians.

Base-2 system helped to simplify calculations centuries before Europeans rediscovered it.

On Friday, billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner announced a new $3 million prize for mathematics known as the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. This is the third such prize that the Valley's elite have created.

You'll get the same number no matter what you start with.

There are similarities in the way a bird flies through the air and a dolphin swims through the water. And yet how do you compare the flap of a butterfly to the enormous movement of a blue whale? The best way, it turns out, is with their respective Strouhal Numbers.

To postulate that P ≠ NP is to allow for a world of mystery, difficulty, and frustration—but also of discovery and inquiry

Web developer Tom Beddard has created a gorgeous series of fractals using his WebGL-based fractal engine, Fractal Lab. Titled ‘Fabergé Fractals’, Beddard’s work looks like a beautiful, mesmerizing cross between Fabergé Eggs and alien technology.

In this excerpt from his new book, Our Mathematical Universe, M.I.T. professor Max Tegmark explores the possibility that math does not just describe the universe, but makes the universe

A few years ago, physicist Brian Skinner asked himself: What are the odds I will die in the next year? He was 25. What got him wondering about this, I have no idea, but, hey, it's something everybody asks. When I can't wedge my dental floss between my two front teeth, I ask it, too. So Brian looked up the answer — there are tables for this kind of thing — and what he discovered is interesting. Very interesting. Even mysterious.

Math and art may appear like two disparate fields, but they’ve been in conversation for millennia. One recent example of the synergistic possibilities between the two comes from Canadian scientists Christian Ilies Vasile and Martin Kryzwinski. The pair have utilized the data visualization software Circos to create beautiful and colorful visual representations of mathematical constants π (pi), φ (phi), and eusing transition probabilities and color-coded digits on Archimedean spirals.

Mathematics may be a universal language but a possible proof of a fiendish problem is proving hard to evaluate – partly because it isn't written in English.

Not everyone agrees that Aristotle invented this little paradox, but everyone agrees that it would be just like him to come up with something like this. The paradox involves two different-sized wheels, one inside another. Think of the edge of your tire and the edge of the hubcap. The two rotate in sync, and they rotate over a certain distance. But should they rotate over the same distance?

Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers—a crucial milestone on the way to the even more elusive twin primes...

Perhaps you encountered these in math classes or an elective in your CompSci degree, and think they’re just “theoretically” interesting. (Or not.) But, Tom Henderson argues, these have relevance to the real world of programming too.

Vi Hart's fantastic video on hexaflexagons (part one). A link to part two is in the related links.

The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians…

People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.

New research shows that if you want to be good at math, you have to practice all different kinds of mathematics.

A famous math problem that has vexed mathematicians for decades has finally met an elegant solution. Mathematicians have now described a geometric solution for the von Neumann-Day problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929.

To determine the nature of infinity, mathematicians face a choice between two new logical axioms. What they decide could help shape the future of mathematical truth.

For researchers there’s a lot that turns on the p value, the number used to determine whether a result is statistically significant. The current consensus is that if p is less than .05, a study has reached…

Great mathematics show!