Humans are usually pretty good at recognizing when they get things wrong, but artificial intelligence systems are not. According to a new study, AI generally suffers from inherent limitations due to a ...

When it comes to teaching math and science, is the grass always greener across the Pacific Ocean? I'm working with educators to help prevent students from hating math before they even know what it is.

Mathematics often feels straightforward, yet some results challenge the way people instinctively think about numbers. Certain paradoxes and probability problems produce answers that seem impossible at ...

No less a mind than Bertrand Russell, of Principia Mathematica fame, was responsible for this paradox, which opened a hole in math. It’s those barbers. The Barber Paradox shows that barbers are not to ...

We recently wrote about how infinitely large sets are not all the same size as each other, but we were a bit vague about what we meant by a set. The people who invented set theory also started out ...

Equations are ordered, elegant mathematical constructs used to describe specific patterns. Can you imagine some formulas depict the very opposite: chaos and randomness? What's more intriguing, they ...

A pair of researchers, one with The Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines in India, the other with the University of Illinois in the U.S., has built a model to explain a paradox of plankton.

Editor’s Note: Published in 1957, this article comes from Martin Gardner’s legendary Scientific American column Mathematical Games. Read more in our special digital issue, Fun and Games. A paradox is ...