Lots of the things we hope to do in life-our goals-can be accomplished in many ways. If you want to go into business for yourself, you might first train at a company that does similar work and then ...

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study, researchers report that ...

Why is mathematics so complicated? It’s a question many students will ask while grappling with a particularly complex calculus problem — and their teachers will probably echo while setting or marking ...

To begin to understand what mathematicians and physicists see in the abstract structures of symmetries, let’s start with a familiar shape. We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does ...