Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a ...

An aptitude for mentally stringing together related items, often cited as a hallmark of human language, may have deep roots in primate evolution, a new study suggests. But “this work shows that the ...

Recursion -- the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind -- has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A ...