A new study reveals that Srinivasa Ramanujan’s century-old formulas for calculating pi unexpectedly emerge within modern theories of critical phenomena, turbulence, and black holes. In school, many of ...

Most of us first hear about the irrational number π (pi)—rounded off as 3.14, with an infinite number of decimal digits—in ...

More than a hundred years ago, long before anyone imagined supercomputers or black hole ...

Lowry Kirkby reviews The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky Thirst for physics: Leonard Susskind's popular series of lectures ...

Discover how Ramanujan's century-old pi formulas connect to modern cosmology and turbulent fluid physics in groundbreaking ...

Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism and the Euler equation top a poll to find the greatest equations of all time. Robert P Crease discusses the results of his reader survey First among equals – ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When it comes to describing the physical world, we can do it ...

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 ...

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 ...

In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the English-professor characters play a game called "Humiliation," where they take turns admitting classic works of literature that they haven't ...

Physicists have transformed a decades-old technique for simplifying quantum equations into a reusable, user-friendly ...