At first glance, corals present as little more than colorful rocks — piles of lobes, stalagmites, and branches poking out from the seafloor. They are anything but. Corals are complex creatures that form enduring colonies, […]
Category: quantamagazine
On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” […]
I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI “reasoning”? Sorry for the air quotes. That punctuational side-eye was more common in 2024, when the specially trained cousins of LLMs now known […]
For 25 years, physicists have been puzzled by an apparent one-part-in-a-million problem. Their expectations of the way that certain particles should wobble in a magnetic field were clashing with what they saw in experiments. The […]
Within every cow is a thriving ecosystem. Churning deep in its intestines, a massive fermentation chamber known as the rumen hosts a robust microbiome that can consume up to 100 pounds of feed daily. Inside […]
One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather […]
Every four years, the math world’s preeminent awards are given to the finest minds of a generation. The young winners — all under 40 on the first day of the year — have reshaped mathematics […]
In theoretical computer science, the key to cracking tough problems is finding the right tools. Most researchers gravitate toward tools that match the problems they hope to solve, and some devote entire careers to mastering […]
One might imagine that, for a mathematician, proving a monumental theorem is a blissful experience. It wasn’t so for Hong Wang. In February 2025, Wang and her collaborator Joshua Zahl presented a 127-page proof of […]
Jacob Tsimerman knows that many people see mathematics as a search for beauty. Over the course of his career, he has encountered beauty many times. But beauty is not what drives him. What he loves […]
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