Patterns

In a world seemingly filled with chaos, physicists have discovered new forms of synchronization and are learning how to predict and control them.

Through exacting geometric calculations, Philip Gibbs has found the smallest known cover for any possible shape.

Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of a mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.

Psychedelic drugs can trigger characteristic hallucinations, which have long been thought to hold clues about the brain’s circuitry. After nearly a century of study, a possible explanation is crystallizing.

When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.

Triangles fit effortlessly together, as do squares. When it comes to pentagons, what gives?

A California housewife who in the 1970s discovered four new types of tessellating pentagons is dead at 94.

A French mathematician has completed the classification of all convex pentagons, and therefore all convex polygons, that tile the plane.

Like scientific puzzles, Bongard problems can lead you through a frustrating blind search until you find that simple, elegant rule that fits a seemingly random pattern.