Published January 7 in the journal Nature, one paper tackled the age-old problem of nature’s construction with a bit of a twist: it suggests that living networks, like our brain, may use some of the ...

Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better ...

Recent theoretical advances continue to uncover profound interconnections between string theory and disparate areas of pure mathematics, notably modular forms, finite groups and vertex operator ...

One of the most striking outcomes of the surface-minimization framework is its ability to explain structural features that ...

If the World Science Festival’s panel on string theory tackled the question of whether the math behind it could be a reliable guide to reality, its panel on the Limits of Understanding seemed to ...

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 10 minutes ...

Mathematics Department Chair Shing-Tung Yau hopes to make analytic geometry and string theory accessible to a wider audience with his new book, “The Shape of Inner Space,” which he co-wrote with ...

For the last 40 years, a dedicated group of theoretical physicists has been beavering away on an ambitious project to create a quantum theory of gravity and unify the four forces of nature. Using ...

Physicists looking for a way to test their theory about strings might make more progress if they tangle them up. String theory — equations that aspire to explain all of nature’s particles and forces — ...

Three decades ago, a British documentary series named Connections aired, which showed viewers how various scientific achievements and discoveries were really interrelated, no matter how disparate they ...