Category: 7. Maths

The human body is made up of a complex community of trillions of cells of diverse shapes and sizes, all working together to keep you alive. The smallest of these cells, like platelets and red blood cells, are dwarfed by massive muscle…

Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the Harvard computer scientist has three children who among them have celebrated more than two dozen birthdays. He knows what it’s…

A group of more than 50 individuals recently had the pleasure of sitting down for an informal chat at MIT with distinguished educator, author, and mathematician Freeman Hrabowski. The group was predominantly composed of…

Honeybees and yellow jackets don’t look much like mathematicians — for one thing, they’re smaller. But collectively, the insects can solve a common architectural conundrum using a geometric solution that they evolved independently…

An unusual arrangement of leaves in a 407-million-year-old fossilized plant is complicating scientists’ understanding of plant evolution.

Most land plants living today have spiral patterns involving the famous Fibonacci sequence of…

Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too.

And it’s about to get even harder.

There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet…

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 12th year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2024 edition of the…

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation has announced that it has awarded graduate fellowships to six students with ties to MIT. These prestigious awards provide each student with five years of doctoral-level research…

One of the most famous messages ever beamed to space was a string of 1,679 bits sent by the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974. But if E.T. sent us such a string, how could we Earthlings even begin to decode it? A new mathematical approach…

Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible…