The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 360 BC, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately ...

A four-sided shape that will always come to rest on the same side no matter what side it starts on has been built by mathematicians, decades after it was first proposed to exist. Mathematicians have ...

We’ve all heard it—no two snowflakes are alike. However, they all seem to share that same six-sided shape, so what’s going on? Why do they follow the same rulebook for structure but still end up ...