“Literature is the opposite of data,” wrote novelist Stephen Marche in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books in October 2012. He cited his favorite line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:…

When Pyotr Stolyarsky died in 1944, he was considered Russia’ s greatest violin teacher. He counted among his pupils a coterie of stars, including David Oistrakh and Nathan Milstein,…

Many subcultures revolve around secret codes—but none do it quite like computer hackers. In our peculiar corner of the world, everyone’s identity is masked by a codename, and the…

Grigori Perelman became famous, despite his adamant opposition, for proving a conjecture from Henri Poincaré, pictured here.In November 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori…

Yitang “Tom” Zhang spent the seven years following the completion of his Ph.D. in mathematics floating between Kentucky and Queens, working for a chain of Subway restaurants, and…

We are a science magazine producing an entire issue on fame—so how could we ignore the Nobel Prize? It lifts a chosen few to scientific superstardom, giving wide publicity to their…

Our understanding of fame is critical to how we see each other and our society. But it is also badly wrong. Let me tell you why. We humans are storytelling and story-finding machines:…

If two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them…

Genetic material is the smoking gun of the modern crime scene. Juries in criminal trials are often encouraged to think of DNA profiling as an exact science, in which telltale traces…

In 2009, researchers working in Thailand made headlines with a small success in a trial of an HIV vaccine. It reduced the rate of infection by 31 percent, the scientists calculated.…