Learn how prior probability informs economic theory and decision-making in Bayesian statistics. Understand its role before collecting new data.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

In an era dominated by social media, misinformation has become an all too familiar foe, infiltrating our feeds and sowing seeds of doubt and confusion. With more than half of social media users across ...

This is an updated version of a story first published on May 5, 2024. For many high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form ...

The modern internet is ruled by algorithms. When you boot up Instagram, for example, what you see in your feed is strategically sorted by the app's AI based on your past activity to keep you engaged ...

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open ...

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics. In the fall of 1915, the foundations of physics ...

Sampling from complex probability distributions is important in many fields, including statistical modeling, machine learning, and physics. This involves generating representative data points from a ...

Calcea Johnson (right), currently studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University, published the new study with her high school classmate, Ne'Kiya Jackson (left), now a student in ...

Two years ago, a couple of high school classmates each composed a mathematical marvel, a trigonometric proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Now, they’re unveiling 10 more. For over 2,000 years, such ...