Divide any circle’s circumference by its diameter and you get pi. But what, exactly, are its digits? Measuring physical circles won’t tell you—your tools are too clunky to discover pi’s endless ...

In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the English-professor characters play a game called "Humiliation," where they take turns admitting classic works of literature that they haven't ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When it comes to describing the physical world, we can do it ...

Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the ...

Math is really hard work for me, but I’ve always enjoyed physics. Some physicists who write have a knack for making the complex simple to help you understand their universe, such as how Einstein’s ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical ...

Many books about science are meant to be pleasure reading. Such books attempt to convey the wonder and fascination and excitement of science, and ideally some of the substance as well. After all, good ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

"Even the +, −, =, and x signs we take for granted only came into widespread use in the 17th century. Which means that the earlier algebraists we know of … all had expressed their equations mostly in ...