In October 2024 Luke Durant, an independent researcher in San Jose, Calif., announced that he had discovered the largest known prime number—so enormous it would take years to write out in full. One ...

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards ...

In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day. By Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the ...

Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work covers anything from archaeology and the environment to technology and culture. Tom has a Master's degree in Journalism. His editorial work ...

It's fun to think about the fundamental physical constants. These are special values used in our models of the physical universe. They include things like the speed of light, the gravitational ...

Planck's constant reveals the quantum world's fundamental energy levels. It shows how light and matter exist in discrete units (quanta). This constant defines limits to our knowledge of particle ...

A star student at her small Alabama high school, Kyra Richardson graduated confident in her academic prowess in all but one subject: math. By the time she arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2024, it ...

Constant pressure charts illustrate the varying *height* of a specific constant pressure surface (e.g., 500 mb), contrasting with surface charts which depict varying *pressure* at a constant height ...

America’s amazing technological achievements, such as SpaceX’s recent rescue of stranded astronauts, mask the death spiral of math learning in the U.S., which has reached an ignominious low with ...

Harvard might be America’s most elite university — but now it’s offering remedial math classes. The school’s math department is providing a new scaled-back math class for freshmen who are apparently ...