When studying programming, you notice something strange.Processes that are extremely complex for humans to think through can ...

An aptitude for mentally stringing together related items, often cited as a hallmark of human language, may have deep roots in primate evolution, a new study suggests. But “this work shows that the ...

It started with the recurrence relation function on the Casio FX-GC100 graphing calculatorSince a recurrence relation is ...

Recursion -- the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind -- has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A ...

(Anup Shah/Stone RF/Getty Images) Human languages are complex and versatile. They reflect our intelligence, our cultures, our need to understand and be understood. Our languages tend to follow ...

Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a ...

One of the biggest surprises in molecular biology was the discovery in 1977 that coding information in genes is interrupted by non-coding sequences known as introns. Much has since been learned about ...

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians. Recent explorations ...

Recursion—the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind—has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A multi-institutional ...