Mathematics

Posed in Hampton, Virginia, Katherine Johnson stands before a backdrop of gathering clouds, "symbolic of the obstacles ... that she had to face in her career," says curator William Pretzer.

Smithsonian Curators Remember Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Highlighted in 'Hidden Figures,' Who Died at 101

An African American woman who battled workplace discrimination, Johnson performed crucial calculations to send astronauts into space

Left, the British Army camped at Balaklava in the Crimea. Right, an angelic Nightingale animates a stained glass window crafted around 1930.

The Defiance of Florence Nightingale

Scholars are finding there’s much more to the “lady with the lamp” than her famous exploits as a nurse in the Crimean War

MIT researchers develop a mathematical model to predict a knot’s stability with the help of color-changing fibers.

The Mathematics of a Well-Tied Knot

Fibers that change color under pressure helped researchers predict knot performance

Purdue University’s INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering works with pre-school, school-age, college undergrads, engineers and parents to test and rate science- and tech-themed products.

The Ten Best STEM Toys to Give as Gifts in 2019

Stretch young learners’ minds with everything from card games to robotic spheres

Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994

John Nash’s Nobel Prize Sells for $735,000

Best known as the subject of "A Beautiful Mind," Nash made pioneering advances in the study of game theory

The spiral pattern of an Aloe polyphylla plant at the University of California Botanical Garden.

Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns

A Japanese shrub’s unique foliage arrangement leads botanists to rethink plant growth models

Living with the “thermostat patriarchy”

Chilly Rooms May Cool Women’s Productivity

A new study has found that women perform better on math and verbal tests in warmer temperatures

Women were involved with the computing field from its earliest days.

The Gendered History of Human Computers

It's ironic that women today must fight for equality in Silicon Valley. After all, their math skills helped launch the digital age

Researchers found that white individuals represented 97 percent of artists featured in the National Gallery of Art's permanent collection

Survey Finds White Men Dominate Collections of Major Art Museums

A comprehensive study reveals that 85 percent of artists featured in permanent collections are white, while 87 percent are men

Despite statistical methods that help sports fans improve their brackets, the probability of a perfect bracket remains something of a mystery in mathematics.

The Mathematical Madness Behind a Perfect N.C.A.A. Basketball Bracket

Picking a perfect bracket is so unlikely that it will almost certainly never occur, even if March Madness continues for billions of years

Uhlenbeck's work on minimal surfaces was instrumental to the foundation of the mathematical field of geometric analysis

Karen Uhlenbeck Is the First Woman to Win Math’s Top Prize

The Abel Prize honoree was recognized for "the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics"

Honey Bees Can Do Simple Math, After a Little Schooling

Researchers trained 14 bees to add and subtract by one, suggesting their tiny brains have found novel ways of doing complicated tasks

The card game Spot It! has become one of the most popular family games in the country, but the secret to how the game works has its roots in the logic puzzles of 19th century mathematicians.

The Mind-Bending Math Behind Spot It!, the Beloved Family Card Game

The simple matching game has some deceptively complex mathematics behind the scenes

The Ten Best Science Books of 2018

These titles explore the wide-ranging implications of new discoveries and experiments, while grounding them in historical context

Extragalactic Background Light

This Is How Much Starlight the Universe Has Produced

4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 photons over 13.7 billion years

The Magformers Sky Track was a favorite for testers.

The Ten Best STEM Toys to Give as Gifts This Year

Experts and kids of all ages recommend these tech toys, which inspire year-round curiosity

A silica sphere with a radius of 50 nanometers is trapped levitating in a beam of light.

Optical Tweezers Give Scientists a Tool to Test the Laws of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum superposition is one of the great mysteries of physics—a mass existing in two states at once—and scientists hope to probe the phenomenon

A Mobius strip.

The Mathematical Madness of Möbius Strips and Other One-Sided Objects

The discovery of the Möbius strip in the mid-19th century launched a brand new field of mathematics: topology

A few pages from the recently digitized codex.

See Leonardo da Vinci's Genius Yourself in These Newly Digitized Sketches

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has made ultra high-resolution scans of two codices available online

Fields Medal recipients, from L to R: Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli, Akshay Venkatesh, Peter Scholze

This Year’s Fields Medal Winners Include a Kurdish Refugee and a 30-Year-Old Professor

Peter Scholze, Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli and Akshay Venkatesh named recipients of award often described as the Nobel Prize for mathematics

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