description the octomatics project is about a new number system which has a lot of advantages over our old decimal system. the name comes from the… Read more “Octomatics”

A fractal, also known as the Koch island, which was first described by Helge von Koch in 1904. It is built by starting with an equilateral triangle,… Read more “The Koch Snowflake”

Physics has its own Rosetta Stones. They’re ciphers, used to translate seemingly disparate regimes of the universe. They tie pure math to any branch of physics your heart… Read more “Laplace’s Equation, Mathematical Key to … Everything”

Prime numbers, divisible only by 1 and themselves, hate to repeat themselves. They prefer not to mimic the final digit of the preceding prime, mathematicians have discovered.… Read more “A peculiar pattern in prime numbers”

Tracking and recording the motion of the sun, the moon, and the planets as they paraded across the desert sky, ancient Babylonian astronomers used simple arithmetic to… Read more “Ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus”

Imagine an archipelago where each island hosts a single tortoise species and all the islands are connected — say by rafts of flotsam. As the tortoises interact… Read more “The Far Ends of a New Universal Law”

Excuse me, but what’s the time?” I’m guessing that you, like me, are guilty of having asked this question, as if it were obvious that there is… Read more “Life Is a Braid in Spacetime”

A mathematical puzzle that resisted solution for 80 years — including computerized attempts to crack it — seems to have yielded to a single mathematician. Terence Tao,… Read more “Maths whizz solves a master’s riddle”