It is 7 o’clock in the morning and Harvey Friedman has just sent an email to an unspecified number of recipients with the subject line “stop what you are doing.” It features…

If the rumors are true, 20th Century Fox will release a remake of the 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage in the next year or two. The conceit behind the film is that its protagonists…

Would you say you are a lucky person? Have unexpected things turned up which made your life better? I don’t mean something as extreme as a major lottery win, but perhaps getting…

Immanuel Kant famously argued that lying is a parasite on truth-telling. But parasites must be self-limiting: Killing your host is an evolutionary dead-end, so a successful parasite…

While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one…

On the average summer Saturday, the mathematician Neil Sloane woke up to a crisis. “There are always crises,” he said— albeit crises of the teapot tempest variety. One Saturday…

Thank you for your interest in our all-inclusive travel package to the fourth dimension. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we get from prospective explorers. So…

We can’t help ourselves—we’re crazy about big things. We’ll venture miles out of our way to see the world’s “largest” rifle (33.3 feet long; Ishpeming, Michigan), high-heeled…

To say that Thomas Robert Malthus was unpopular would be putting it mildly. His 19th-century contemporary Percy Shelley, the revered poet, called him a eunuch and a tyrant. The philosopher…

Andrew Wiles gave a series of lectures cryptically titled “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations” at a mathematics conference in Cambridge, England, in June…