In an Indonesian wayang (shadow puppet) performance, a triangular puppet called kayon opens and closes the show. “I researched the kayon because it's rather less well-known [among wayang puppets] and ...

Fractals are sometimes referred to as a “visual representation of math.” They can be observed in the spatial arrangements found in many familiar forms, patterns and shapes in nature: from the ...

Future nano-devices are expected to underpin many of the technologies that society relies on, ranging from household electronics to medical implants. One of the great challenges of bringing this ...

Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the Yale professor who gave the world mathematical tools to describe such complex phenomena as clouds and the patterns of leaves on trees, died last week at the age of 85. The ...

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 ...

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously once wrote, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." My mind, and assuredly those of countless others, never did after ...