Universality

According to mathematical legend, Peter Sarnak and Noga Alon made a bet about optimal graphs in the late 1980s. They’ve now both been proved wrong.

A group of mathematicians has shown that at critical moments, a symmetry called rotational invariance is a universal property across many physical systems.

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

A new look at a ubiquitous phenomenon has uncovered unexpected fractal behavior that could give us clues about the early universe and the arrow of time.

Physicists have found examples of “universality” in a system of confined bubbles. The work could help researchers understand the strange behavior of singularities.

Mathematicians have found that materials conduct electricity when electrons follow a universal mathematical pattern.

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

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