Standard Deviation

When Occupy Wall Street protesters began camping out in Zuccotti Park in 2011, Venkat Venkatasubramanian visited more than once. He didn’t participate in the protests against wealth inequality, he said, “but I knew what they were talking about. I kne

Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists, from 1 to 5. A physicist in the first class had ten times the impact of someone in the second class, and so on. He modes

If I told you that I was 99.81 percent certain I had made a big discovery, you might suggest it was time to break out the champagne. If I said the discovery resolved one of the biggest outstanding problems in science and would probably let me punch a

In celebration of our 20th anniversary, we honor the 20 most dominant athletes of the past 20 years.

It’s easy to name science and math geniuses. I can just flip open my old book from the 1960s, which lists “100 Great Scientists”; it contains all the names you’d find on most popular lists of scientific geniuses: Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, Boh