Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while […]
Category: quantamagazine
For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish. It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the […]
For decades, ecologists have puzzled over a mystery: Why do some natural habitats get overrun by invasive species while others seem to repel outside threats? In a classic 1958 book on the subject, the ecologist […]
Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from […]
What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using mathematics and physics to explore the form and function of common […]
At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists were […]
Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well on a […]
Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be in multiple possible locations at once. A particle’s state spreads out like a wave, peaking where the particle is likely to be found. When you measure its […]
You’ve just gotten home from an exhausting day. All you want to do is put your feet up and zone out to whatever is on television. Though the inactivity may feel like a well-earned rest, […]
In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open for over three […]
Recent Comments