"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Fano varieties are known as the basic “atomic structure” of geometry, but are notoriously difficult to ...

On August 10, 1632, only 10 months before the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for his advocacy of Copernican astronomy, five Jesuits met in Rome to discuss a seemingly arcane point: Is a ...

But primes are often considered the building blocks of mathematics, and math itself is the scaffolding that supports ...

Hunt for shapes and make familiar objects by putting together several different shapes. Warm up with a Mystery Math Mistake to tell whether Dotson's 10-frames represent a number more than his focus ...

Last spring, mathematician Henry Segerman found a peculiar post on Facebook. It was by a programmer who had could not conjure mental images---a condition called aphantasia. Segerman immediately ...

How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called ...

Scientists studying graphene’s properties are using a new mathematical framework to make extremely accurate characterizations of the two-dimensional material’s shape. Graphene, discovered in 2004, is ...

In an old Indian parable, six blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. They disagree about what the elephant must look like: Is it smooth or rough? Is it like a snake (so thinks the man ...

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