When Bob Santilli, a senior project manager at UPS, was invited in 2009 to his daughter’s fifth grade class on Career Day, he struggled with how to describe exactly what he did for…

A 1959 Sport Cars Illustrated review of Chevrolet’s new Corvair describes the car as “not without sin.” A throwaway comment on comfort soon became an appropriate description.…

A truck is traveling on the freeway. Inside, stacks of bananas are piled high. Picked a few weeks ago at a plantation, they’ve traveled overseas in climate-controlled cargo ships,…

“None knows whence creation arose; And whether he has or has not made it; He who surveys it from the lofty skies. Only he knows—or perhaps not.”This is an edited snippet…

When Rick Curtis, Chief Meteorologist for Southwest Airlines, walks down the hallway, he is often asked, “What does this week look like?” For Curtis, it’s the universal question…

In engineering, uncertainty is usually as welcome as sand in a salad. The development of digital technologies, from the alphabet to the DVD, has been driven in large part by the desire…

 “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor…

Georg Cantor died in 1918 in a sanatorium in Halle, Germany. A pre-eminent mathematician, he had laid the foundation for the theory of infinite numbers in the 1870s. At the time, his…

When Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. Her assistant is only good at the repetitive tasks, like sifting flour, but he makes the job more fun. Naoki…

Our namesake, the nautilus, is not just a cultural and mythical object; it has also some rich (and not imagined) math to it. That’s because it is one of nature’s fractals. These…