This holiday-themed brainteaser looks simple, but it's quietly tripping up adults everywhere I’ve been out of school for decades, and I don’t spend my days solving equations (I’m more of a word person ...

If you’ve spent any time planning for retirement, you probably know the basics of Social Security. Most people can start claiming benefits at age 62, reaching full retirement age (FRA) between 66 and ...

A new report from OpenAI and a group of outside scientists shows how GPT-5, the company’s latest AI large language model (LLM), can help with research from black holes to cancer‑fighting cells to math ...

Math scores in the US have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they’re using could be making things worse ...

UC San Diego says it’s struggling to deal with a large and growing number of freshmen whose math skills are below middle-school level, leaving many unprepared to thrive at an institution famed for its ...

A tool called AI-Newton can derive scientific laws from raw data, but is some way from developing human-like reasoning. Most artificial-intelligence (AI) models can reliably identify patterns in data ...

Nothing sinks a golfer’s spirits like their ball zinging back out of the hole. Now, physics and mathematics explain how it happens. The anguish of a “lip out” occurs when a golfer putts a ball, and ...

The amplituhedron is a geometric shape with an almost mystical quality: Compute its volume, and you get the answer to a central calculation in physics about how particles interact. Now, a young ...

AI learning tools will be introduced to undergraduate physics and math courses this fall. The Artificial Intelligence and Math Skills program, a two-year project aiming to decrease learning ...

The president’s boasts about his pharmaceutical cuts aren’t just imaginary—they’re also gibberish. Speaking with reporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Sunday evening, Donald Trump suggested that one ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical ...