Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I include a comprehensive set of recipes for turning photographs into...

Website ads fidget, interrupt and mislead. They’re loud and ungainly. They fixate on things you may not care about and they sometimes spread viruses.

Like adolescent boys, their designers seem to be...

When considering poverty, our national conversation tends to overlook systemic causes. Instead, we often blame the poor for their poverty. Commentators echo the...

Republicans in Congress failed to block the Iran nuclear agreement from taking effect by the September 17 deadline, which means the Obama administration can now focus on implementing the historic accord.

On the surface it might appear that the key players who lobbied lawmakers the hardest for the...

The prevailing response from white politicians such as GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush to #BlackLivesMatter has been “all lives matter.”

Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were heavily criticized for initially responding to...

The amount of municipal waste being disposed of in the US is more than double – 262 million tonnes versus 122 million tonnes in 2012 – previous estimates, our new study shows. We also found that the US has plenty of space to put it all –...

The papal trip to the United States that Francis will begin on September 22 is the most difficult of his pontificate so far.

This is because of what I call the pope’s “American problem” – a cultural and ideological distance between the more socially minded Jesuit from Argentina...

In March 1991, then-President George H W Bush called for a “New World Order,” a post-Cold War world in which “freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”

Today, Americans and Europeans are finding what has been called a new world disorder. The sense of...

On March 16, 1941 – with European cities ablaze and Jews being herded into ghettos – The New York Times Magazine featured an illustrated story on Adolf...

I first learned about autism in 1997 in my high school psychology course. It was relegated to a small paragraph in a chapter on childhood disorders. The film Rainman had come out a decade earlier, publicizing the condition to a degree. But autism still wasn’t well-known...