Science Math

For going on two decades, Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column has been answering reader questions on all fields of science. We’ve taken your questions from the basic to the esoteric and reached out to top scientists, professors, and researchers to find out why the sky is blue or whether we really only use 10 percent of our brains. Now, we’ve combed through our archives and have compiled some of the most interesting questions (and answers) into a series of books.

This 10-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind the calculations: the passions and rivalries of mathematicians struggling to get their ideas heard. Professor Marcus du Sautoy shows how these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world and proves that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science.

These stories from Quanta Magazine map the routes of mathematical exploration, showing listeners how cutting-edge research is done, while illuminating the productive tension between conjecture and proof, theory and intuition. Listeners of The Prime Number Conspiracy are headed on "breathtaking intellectual journeys to the bleeding edge of discovery strapped to the narrative rocket of humanity's never-ending pursuit of knowledge," says Quanta editor-in-chief Thomas Lin.

In this must-have for anyone who wants to better understand their love life, a mathematician pulls back the curtain and reveals the hidden patterns—from dating sites to divorce, sex to marriage—behind the rituals of love. The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics isn’t a crucial tool for understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns—from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do.

A brilliant research mathematician reveals math to be a creative art form on par with painting, poetry, and sculpture, and rejects the standard anxiety-producing teaching methods used in most schools today. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart's controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike, altering the way we think about math forever.

Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. Keith Houston transports listeners from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators.

Math-genius mercenary Cas Russell has stopped a shadow organization from brainwashing the world and discovered her past was deliberately erased and her superhuman abilities deliberately created. And that's just the start: When a demolitions expert targets Cas and her friends, and the hidden conspiracy behind Cas' past starts to reappear, the past, present, and future collide in a race to save one of her dearest friends.

In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of 5,000 digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide?

The young field of quantum mechanics holds out the promise that some of humanity's wildest dreams may be realized. Serious scientists, working off of theories first developed by Einstein and his colleagues 70 years ago, have been investigating the phenomenon known as "entanglement," one of the strangest aspects of the strange universe of quantum mechanics. New experiments suggest it does happen, and that it may lead to unbreakable codes, and even teleportation...

If you need to learn how to use machine learning, big data, data science, and neural networks but you can’t (or there is no time to) study the complicated math and algorithms behind these technologies, then keep reading. All technologies related to artificial intelligence represent an incredible opportunity if you want to grow your business or if you are searching for a new job, but it’s not very easy to understand how they work.

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—powering news feeds, curating search results, and invisibly steering our lives. We talk to it and, increasingly, it talks back. And sometimes, its answers seem eerily smart, until they don't.

Have you always been fascinated by quantum physics' spellbinding twirls but been held back by its daunting equations? Are you eager to explore the Quantum universe and unravel its mysteries but dread diving into a sea of complex numbers? Master the mystical world of Quantum Physics in just a few hours. Empower yourself with the knowledge of the microscopic universe, minus the mind-boggling math!

For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until they encountered the quintic equation, which resisted solution for three centuries. Working independently, two prodigies ultimately proved that the quintic cannot be solved by a simple formula. The first popular account of the mathematics of symmetry and order, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved is told not through abstract formulas but in a beautifully written and dramatic account of the lives and work of some of the greatest and most intriguing mathematicians in history.

The US healthcare system excels in research, innovation, and clinical care, but is failing to keep up with the operational challenges of the digital age. Today’s healthcare organizations face immense financial challenges, and their most valuable resources - people, rooms, and equipment - are being used inefficiently. The result? Long wait times for patients, overstressed staff, underused assets, and poor ROI for organizations.

For 20 years, Nerd Nite has delivered to live audiences around the world, the most interesting, fun, and informative presentations about science, history, the arts, pop culture, you name it. There hasn’t been a rabbit hole that their army of presenters hasn’t been afraid to explore. Finally, after countless requests to bring Nerd Nite to more fans across the globe, co-founders and college pals Matt Wasowski and Chris Balakrishnan are bringing listeners the quirky and accessible science content that they crave in book form.

Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars.

How many people achieve a cult following because of their writing in mathematics? Only a handful, and Martin Gardner is among the most well-known and well-loved. Not only did he present a notoriously difficult subject in an engaging and accessible way, but in doing so, he attracted an incredibly broad readership. His “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American ran nearly every month for 26 years and was one of the most popular in the magazine’s history.

In 1952, April is seven years old and adores her big sister, Annabel. But Annabel is failing her math class and desperately needs help with a tough math problem. April decides to write to Albert Einstein, asking him to give a hand.