Journalist Gary Wolf spends his days in pursuit of the most fascinating things. As a contributing editor at Wired, he's written about technology, mushroom hunters, venture capitalists ...

Hannah Fry researches the trends in our civilization and ways we can forecast its future.

You and your brother have discovered another realm and set off exploring the new wonderful world. Along the way, you see a troll catching creatures in an enormous net. The troll agrees to release the creatures if you can come up with a statement that is both truth and false. Can you come up with the correct sentence and force the troll to releas...

Townspeople are demanding that a corrupt merchant's collection of 30 rubies be confiscated to reimburse the victims of his schemes. The king announces that the fine will be determined through a game of wits between the merchant and the king's most clever advisor – you. Can you outfox the merchant and win back the greatest amount of rubies to hel...

Your professor has accidentally stepped through a time portal in his physics lab. You've got just a minute to jump through before it closes and leaves him stranded in history. Your only way back is to grab enough colored nodules to create a new portal to open a doorway through time. Can you take the right amount of nodules to get back to the pre...

Best known as the voice of Roger Rabbit, Charles Fleischer's multi-decade career includes work on stage and on screen, and an online emporium of unusual observations called MonkeyDog.

As your country's top spy, you must infiltrate the headquarters of the evil syndicate, find the secret control panel, and deactivate their death ray. But your reconnaissance team is spotty, and you have only limited information about the control panel's whereabouts. Can you solve the control room riddle and deactivate their weapon in time? Denni...

The family of giants you work for is throwing a fancy dinner party, but there's a problem — the elder giant's favorite shirt is wrinkled! To fix it, you'll need to power up the giant iron. It needs two batteries to work, but the baby giant mixed the working battery pile with the dead pile. Can you test the batteries so that you get a working pai...

Your team has developed a probe to study an alien monolith. It needs protective coatings — in red, purple and green — to cope with the environments it passes through. Can you figure out how to apply the colors so the probe survives the trip? Dan Finkel shows how. [TED-Ed Animation by Anton Trofimov].

One deck. Fifty-two cards. How many arrangements? Let's put it this way: Any time you pick up a well shuffled deck, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and might not exist again. Yannay Khaikin explains how factorials allow us to pinpoint the exact (very large) number of permutations in a standa...

A hostile artificial intelligence called NIM has taken over the world's computers. You're the only person skilled enough to shut it down, and you'll only have one chance. Can you survive and shut off the artificial intelligence? Dan Finkel shows how. [TED-Ed Animation by Artrake Studio]

The good news is that your experimental robo-ants are a success. The bad news is that you accidentally gave them the ability to shoot deadly lasers ... and you can't turn it off. Can you stop them from escaping their habitat before the lasers are activated? Dan Finkel shows how. [TED-Ed Animation by Artrake Studio].

Euclid, known as the "Father of Geometry," developed several of modern geometry's most enduring theorems--but what can we make of his mysterious fifth postulate, the parallel postulate? Jeff Dekofsky shows us how mathematical minds have put the postulate to the test and led to larger questions of how we understand mathematical principles. [Direc...

A shooting star crashes onto Earth and a hideous blob emerges. It creeps and leaps, it glides and slides. It's also unstoppable: no matter what you throw at it, it just re-grows and continues its rampage. The only way to save the planet is to cut the entire blob into precise acute triangles while it sleeps, rendering it inert. Can you stop the b...

Finding the right mate is no cakewalk -- but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.

A consultant to the CIA and the Department of Defense, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has built an intricate computer model that can predict the outcomes of international conflicts with bewildering accuracy.

Want a different perspective of the world? Get a better, more friendly grasp of statistics -- one of the most understood and misused tools in modern society.

Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.

Stephen Hawking's scientific investigations have shed light on the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the ultimate fate of the universe. His bestselling books for a general audience have given an appreciation of physics to millions.

After astonishing success as a mathematician, code breaker and billionaire hedge fund manager, Jim Simons is mastering yet another field: philanthropy.

"Where do great ideas come from?" Starting with this question in mind, Vittorio Loreto takes us on a journey to explore a possible mathematical scheme that explains the birth of the new. Learn more about the "adjacent possible" -- the crossroads of what's actual and what's possible -- and how studying the math that drives it could explain how we...

By masterminding a project to model a coral reef armed only with crochet hooks, Margaret Wertheim hopes to bring some of the most complicated mathematical models embodied in our universe into the minds (and hands) of the masses.

Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.

Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.

As an information theorist and computer scientist, David MacKay uses hard math to assess our renewable energy options.

Alex Wissner-Gross applies science and engineering principles to big (and diverse) questions, like: "What is the equation for intelligence?" and "What's the best way to raise awareness about climate change?"

Neil Turok is working on a model of the universe that explains the big bang -- while, closer to home, he's founded a network of math and science academies across Africa.

Think you're good at guessing stats? Guess again. Whether we consider ourselves math people or not, our ability to understand and work with numbers is terribly limited, says data visualization expert Alan Smith. In this delightful talk, Smith explores the mismatch between what we know and what we think we know.

Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions ("what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?") using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader's question about Google's data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer — in which, shhh, you might ac...

Algorithms play a big part in our day-to-day lives. From search engines to architecture, explore how these formulas affect the way we view and interact with the world around us.