New work on the problem of “scissors congruence” explains when it’s possible to slice up one shape and reassemble it as another. If you have two flat paper shapes and a pair of scissors, can you cut ...

When most people think of shapes, they imagine a triangle, a rectangle, or maybe even a fancier-sounding rhombus or trapezoid. But to mathematicians, shapes encompass a vast universe of surprising ...

Scientists have developed cube-shaped magnetic building blocks that can be assembled into two-dimensional shapes and controlled by an external magnetic field. They can be used for soft robotics ...

Mathematicians are “reinventing the wheel” by giving it a new shape. Their newly imagined wheel looks like a many-dimensional guitar pick, and it could theoretically roll in ways beyond our ...