Why do some melodies feel instantly right, balanced, memorable and satisfying, even if you have never heard them before? New research from the University of Waterloo suggests that more than creativity ...

Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms. All of modern mathematics is built on ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in ...