Winter means tangerines. The joy of sitting in a warm room and peeling tangerines until your fingers turn yellow is a luxury that can only be savored in winter. As I was eating tangerines, I looked at ...

How bees, beer cans and big data all solve the same problem: not enough space. By Steven Strogatz Photo illustrations by Jens Mortensen Each installment of “Math, Revealed” starts with an object, ...

In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has ...