Once dismissed as a relic of the Middle Ages, the spirit of metaphysical speculation is alive and well -- in computer science. Over candlelight in cathedrals and monkish cells, medieval metaphysicians ...

Those of us interested in the position of mathematics in public culture could not help but be impressed a few weeks back, when the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s best-seller list was briefly occupied not by ...

There’s a time in every geek’s development when they learn of Conway’s Game of Life. This is usually followed by an afternoon spent on discovering that the standard rule set has been chosen because ...

EXTRAORDINARY claims demand extraordinary proof, and the claims made by Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist, in his new book are extraordinary indeed. “A New Kind of Science” professes to offer an ...

It’s been more than ten years now since the idea emerged of using chaos to encrypt messages. The approach is straightforward. Start with a message, superimpose it on a chaotic signal and send. If the ...