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The world of comedy hasn’t exactly been kind to scientists, but here are a couple of jokes in which math nerds get the last laugh.

Schools across America are switching to a four-day week, hoping to stave off the effects of budget cuts – but fuelling fears of hurting kids’ education.

In his latest op/ed Nick Kristof is lamenting the fact that girls are outperforming boys at school. Kristof is as ardent a defender of women’s rights as anyone in the […]

Freeman Dyson fell in love with math, science, and nature as a child. Later, as a statistician in World War II, he had a “front-row seat view” of mass tragedy.

This remarkable video was made by the new Dean of the Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria. It is Professor Nohria’s equivalent, in a way, of will.i.am’s Yes, We Can, the […]

When Benoit Mandelbrot first began the work that led to the birth of fractal geometry, there was “an explosion of interest” from his colleagues. “Everybody in mathematics had given up […]

The word “fractals,” which Benoit Mandelbrot invented, has caught on with everyone from kids to club owners.

Scientific estimates of Earth’s maximum capacity range in the thousands of billions, but here’s some troubling numbers we have confirmed: Earth’s 6.8 billion residents produce enough food to feed between […]

Smart people have long had a history of quirky and inexplicable habits: Nietzsche wound up hugging horses, Freud couldn’t kick a drug addiction, Nikola Tesla adored white pigeons and loathed […]

There is a proven mathematical theorem for why dating and finding a job in a large urban area is difficult and frustrating.

The father of fractal geometry marvels that his work has led to computer renderings of natural shapes that are indistinguishable from the real thing.

I spoke with one of Atlanta’s former mayors last week about the new advocacy organization she had just joined. Shirley Franklin, the first black woman to run the city, seems […]

John Abele has ideas for how to fix the problem with math and science primary education in the U.S.

Steven Brams’ solution to math’s “cake-cutting problem” can be applied to everything from divorce settlements to land disputes in the Middle East. But does he use it on his own […]

Peter Woit believes that mathematicians and scientists are led astray by seeking “elegant” solutions. But there is one theorem that makes him wax poetic.

I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I […]

Physics is as vulnerable to fads and politics as other disciplines. Math avoids the same fate by being content to stay “completely useless.”

Peter Woit explains the “deep relation” between the two disciplines and the most mind-bending new ways in which that relation is being explored.

A person’s aptitude for recognising faces is heritable, and is inherited separately from general intelligence or IQ, according to twin studies at MIT and in Beijing.

The other day my Triscuits came with a package of basil seeds glued into the box. According to the instructions, these could be used to start my very own “home […]

The second part of Eruptions readers’ recollections of the historic May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Poker involves a rare blend of logic and instinct, but which will help you the most?

Textbooks–and perhaps, uniquely, economics textbooks–are not known for their literary brilliance. Why should they be? Does math need metaphor? In college when we think about numbers we think about things […]

People do many things without knowing why: buy stuff they didn’t think they wanted, vote differently when they’re in one setting than they would in another, order a different lunch […]

When I began listening to the recorded testimony of Wall Street banking executives to Congress Wednesday on C-Span, I started to feel like I was sitting in a circle at […]

Steven Pinker’s attack on Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times Book Review was more lucid and entertaining than it was intellectually honest. Pinker’s take-away claim is that Gladwell’s work […]

Some time in the early 1960s, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was asked by a university librarian to give his advice about some dusty journals no one consulted—should they be thrown […]

Spare some change? This past Thursday, the New York Times ran a special section on giving, the big front page story of which was all about giving small. You know, […]

Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter are the scientists whose names will always be associated with mapping of the human genome — after racing to complete the job, the two […]

Applied Omniscience Defined – from the scientific stance –