Features

A complete classification could lead to a wealth of new materials and technologies. But some exotic phases continue to resist understanding.

An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics.

Computer scientists are finding ways to code curiosity into intelligent machines.

Physicists are trying to rewrite the axioms of quantum theory from scratch in an effort to understand what it all means. The problem? They’ve been almost too successful.

June Huh thought he had no talent for math until a chance meeting with a legendary mind. A decade later, his unorthodox approach to mathematical thinking has led to major breakthroughs.

New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than do the sum of their microscopic components.

As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information.

For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering.

A decades-old method called the “bootstrap” is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.