(THE CONVERSATION) Among high school students and adults, girls and women are much more likely to use traditional, step-by-step algorithms to solve basic math problems – such as lining up numbers to ...

Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge—involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists ...

Got the travel bug this summer? Just make sure you don’t pick up any other bugs when you hit the road. No matter where I go on vacation, I’ve always taken a fully-stocked mini medicine bag with the ...

Using an advanced Monte Carlo method, Caltech researchers found a way to tame the infinite complexity of Feynman diagrams and solve the long-standing polaron problem, unlocking deeper understanding of ...

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 ...

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, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve—akin to identifying a ...

Right now, quantum computers are small and error-prone compared to where they’ll likely be in a few years. Even within those limitations, however, there have been regular claims that the hardware can ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Computer scientists often ...