"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Fano varieties are known as the basic “atomic structure” of geometry, but are notoriously difficult to ...

On August 10, 1632, only 10 months before the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for his advocacy of Copernican astronomy, five Jesuits met in Rome to discuss a seemingly arcane point: Is a ...

In 1867, French mathematician Pierre Ossian Bonnet proved something that seemed like common sense: if you know how far apart ...

Mathematicians show “soft cell” shapes are abundant in natural world. Soft cells are described as natural tiles with curved edges—a stark contrast to the mathematical solutions for creating tiling ...

In two dimensions, it’s the Reuleaux triangle: an equilateral triangle with curved arcs connecting each corner, creating a shape with a constant width but a smaller area than a circle. Now, a team of ...

Fractal geometry is a field of math born in the 1970s and mainly developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. If you’ve already heard of fractals, you’ve probably seen the picture above. It’s called the Mandelbrot ...

Scientists studying graphene’s properties are using a new mathematical framework to make extremely accurate characterizations of the two-dimensional material’s shape. Graphene, discovered in 2004, is ...