In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized ...

“Why bring together two fields that seem to many people so very disparate? What could mathematics and poetry share, except that the mention of either one is sometimes enough to bring an uneasy chill ...

Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I ...

Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines – one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny. From Islamic ...

The Chinese money plant, commonly seen in homes and offices as a simple ornamental houseplant, is now drawing serious ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

Mathematical patterns reveal profound truths about the universe and, surprisingly, about our inner lives as well. These five visual math concepts offer unique frameworks for understanding our behavior ...