Math

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, cultural, and societal shifts. Studying the evolution of languages can thus offer valuable insight into how human […]

A paper appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a strikingly simple answer to a longstanding question: How do people learn and settle on shared social conventions, from everyday habits to workplace […]

Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad arrive with a booklet of their best, most original problems. Those booklets get shared among delegations, then quietly disappear. No one had ever collected them […]

People often solve simple arithmetic problems, such as basic addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, in their minds. The precise mental processes they rely on to solve these problems, however, are not entirely clear. Researchers at […]

How can public spaces remain safe when large crowds move through them? Engineers and researchers who study these environments often rely on physical models borrowed from fluid dynamics—a branch of physics that describes the collective […]

Recently, a cheerful 100-year-old message in a bottle was found on the south-west coast of Australia. In it, a World War One soldier proclaimed to be “as happy as Larry.”This article was originally published on […]

A University of Houston researcher and his collaborators have developed a mathematical model that helps identify whether a competitive environment is healthy, stagnant or skewed. Published in the journal npj Complexity, the study led by […]

As organizations increasingly rely on algorithms to rank candidates for jobs, university spots, and financial services, a new method, named hyperFA*IR, offers a more principled approach when picking candidates based on a limited pool of […]

Many drivers will know the feeling: you pull ahead of the slower car you’ve been stuck behind and cruise the open road ahead at your own, faster speed. By the time you reach the next […]

Debates over how geometry is understood and learned date back at least to the days of Plato, with more recent scholars concluding that only humans possess the foundations of this understanding. However, a new analysis […]