It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

Imaginary numbers might seem like unicorns and goblins — interesting but irrelevant to reality. But for describing matter at its roots, imaginary numbers turn out to be essential. They seem to be ...

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 ...

In 1935, Albert Einstein, working with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, grappled with a possibility revealed by the new laws of quantum physics: that two particles could be entangled, or correlated, ...