"Of all the equations of physics, perhaps the most magical is the Dirac equation." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

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 BBC recently asked something more profound of its ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in ...

The Navier-Stokes equations describe simple, everyday phenomena, like water flowing from a garden hose, yet they provide a million-dollar mathematical challenge. Physics contains equations that ...

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 ...