What happens when machines surpass the most brilliant human minds? Mathematicians are finding out

Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the world.

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I arrived alone and unprepared for a world of electronic badges, hacking contests and unwritten rules. By the end, I was already thinking about next year's event.

As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?

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AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understa...

Created by legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the badges for this year’s famed security conference aim to push the boundaries of security and transparency.

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Focus, commitment, and insight resulted in a “once in a century” proof. Hong Wang is now just the third woman to win a Fields Medal.

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

Researchers see enormous power in new tools—but also the potential end of astrophysics as a human endeavor

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear w

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.

Some things have changed, and some haven't. Also: hello sailor!

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond.

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the

AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.

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Shirley Wang's father, Lin, was on a business trip when he ran into NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley. It was the beginning of a friendship.

The punk-rock icon and writer has spent more than 50 years in his East Village tenement apartment.

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I went into Hyperion blind, decades ago, knowing almost nothing about it. I was never the same.

9 track album

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

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Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit taught us how to separate good science from the work of charlatans. In 2026, that matters more than ever.

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.