Explainers

Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites or genetic junk.

To explore quantum phenomena, we must leave the familiar world and enter the abstract realm of Hilbert space.

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what were his actual mathematical contributions?

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily.

The basic shape that best describes our expanding universe is also the hardest shape for physicists to understand.

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between resources such as time and memory.