Most famous equation: Einstein's E = mc2, which means energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Known digits of pi: More than 105 trillion digits Digits of pi NASA uses for equations: ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s the same math that explains how, under the right conditions, the atmosphere above a barren plain can produce a roiling tornado. Merle has had enormous success taming these blowups in the ...

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers, in a surprise discovery, have found ...

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 ...

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 ...

An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics. Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most ...