Education

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.”

Three high schoolers and their mentor revisited a century-old theorem to prove that all knots can be found in a fractal called the Menger sponge.

The mathematician David Bessis claims that everyone is capable of, and can benefit greatly from, mathematical thinking.

Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, has a vision for bringing “joyous, beautiful math” — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere.

Jordan Ellenberg enjoys studying — and writing about — the mathematics underlying everyday phenomena.

How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries.

Sizing up patternless sets is hard, so mathematicians rely on simple bounds to help answer their questions.

Finding the best way to approximate the ever-elusive irrational numbers pits the infinitely large against the infinitely small.

No one knows how to find the smallest shape that can cover all other shapes of a certain width. But high school geometry is getting us closer to an answer.