History of science

In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.

Over hundreds of years, increasingly sophisticated instruments have revealed — and continue to reveal — the secrets of our star.

By replacing the most fundamental concept in topology, Peter Scholze and Dustin Clausen are taking the first step in a far bigger program to understand why numbers behave the way they do.

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?

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean.

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology.

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology.

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation.