American students have been falling behind in math for decades—with test scores that consistently rank in the bottom 25% globally compared to students in other developed countries—and the COVID-19 pandemic made the situation worse....

Pedestrian crossings generally showcase the best in pedestrian behavior, with people naturally forming orderly lanes as they cross the road, smoothly passing those coming from the opposite direction without any bumps or scrapes. Sometimes, however, the flow gets chaotic, with individuals weaving...

A mathematical problem solved by Susanna Heikkilä relates to the classification of quasiregularly elliptic 4-manifolds, asking what four-dimensional shapes can be obtained by deforming four-dimensional Euclidean geometry. The article by Heikkilä and Pekka Pankka has been published in the Annals of...

Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions....

What do albatrosses searching for food, stock market fluctuations, and the dispersal patterns of seeds in the wind have in common?...

How will artificial intelligence affect the distribution of income and wealth this century? After falling through much of the 20th century, income inequality, measured as the fraction of income going to the richest 1% of residents, has been rising since the 1980s. The fraction has doubled in both...

In 1907, the English author and mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney posed a puzzle: Can any equilateral triangle be cut into as few pieces as possible that will fit together to form a perfect square? Four weeks later, he presented an elegant solution, showing that only four pieces were needed....

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Cologne have developed an AI-based learning system that recognizes strengths and weaknesses in mathematics by tracking eye movements with a webcam to generate problem-solving hints. This enables teachers to provide...

Studying epidemics can help us plan for the future and identify better ways of dealing with them. Now, in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a multi-institutional research team led by the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, has worked...

How many people will travel during a given week between two specific cities? Answering this question is important for many reasons, for example, to design efficient public transport infrastructures, or, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, to understand how mobility patterns could be used...