The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 360 BC, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately ...

Crows are able to look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don't, according to a provocative new study. It's the first ...

The growth of rose petals exploits a geometric trick previously unobserved in nature, physicists have found. Using theoretical analysis, computer simulations and experiments with rubbery plastic ...

Mathematicians show “soft cell” shapes are abundant in natural world. Soft cells are described as natural tiles with curved edges—a stark contrast to the mathematical solutions for creating tiling ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an ...