Ramanujan’s elegant formulas for calculating pi, developed more than a century ago, have unexpectedly resurfaced at the heart of modern physics. Researchers at IISc discovered that the same ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...

Most famous equation: Einstein's E = mc2, which means energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Known digits of pi: More than 105 trillion digits Digits of pi NASA uses for equations: ...

Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the ...

Many books about science are meant to be pleasure reading. Such books attempt to convey the wonder and fascination and excitement of science, and ideally some of the substance as well. After all, good ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Symmetry also has an aesthetic meaning, although this is ...

Frank Merle is used to confronting a messy world. He works on the mathematics of highly nonlinear systems—ones that respond in dramatic, unpredictable ways to even the smallest changes. It’s the same ...

An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link The internet is stuffed with online quizzes and surveys, ranging from which "Friends" character you are to who you're about to vote for. But the ...

The doors to MIT are always unlocked. If you slip in at night and take a long walk down the fluorescent hallway called the Infinite Corridor, you will pass flatscreen monitors displaying friendly ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

Black holes exist in our universe. That’s widely accepted today. Physicists have detected the X-rays emitted when black holes feed, analyzed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and even ...

An eminent mathematician reveals that his advances in the study of millennia-old mathematical questions owe to concepts derived from physics. Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most ...