"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Fano varieties are known as the basic “atomic structure” of geometry, but are notoriously difficult to ...

In nature, many things have evolved that differ in size, color and, above all, in shape. While the color or size of an object can be easily described, the description of a shape is more complicated.

Illustration of a set of real zeros of a graph polynomial (middle) and two Feynman diagrams. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences How can the behavior of elementary particles ...

Last spring, mathematician Henry Segerman found a peculiar post on Facebook. It was by a programmer who had could not conjure mental images---a condition called aphantasia. Segerman immediately ...

On August 10, 1632, only 10 months before the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for his advocacy of Copernican astronomy, five Jesuits met in Rome to discuss a seemingly arcane point: Is a ...