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 […]
Category: quantamagazine
For Michael Frank, efficiency has always been a major preoccupation. As a student in the 1990s, he was originally interested in artificial intelligence. But once he realized how much energy the technology would use, he […]
For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical elegance, the theory still lacks empirical evidence. One of its most intriguing, […]
Inside Manu Prakash are two scientists. A bioengineer at Stanford University, he spends half his time studying urgent health issues with global impact and the rest pursuing questions “of no use to anyone,” he said. […]
Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in […]
The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward operation: One of the first mathematical truths we learn is that 1 plus 1 equals 2. But mathematicians still […]
One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was […]
Weighing in at a single ounce, the white-crowned sparrow can fly 2,600 miles, from Mexico to Alaska, on its annual spring migration, sometimes traveling 300 miles in a single night. Arctic terns make even longer […]
On the afternoon of September 30, 1906, a crowd of 200,000 Parisians congregated near the city’s center to watch the premiere of what would become the world’s most prestigious gas balloon race. Sixteen of the […]
Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of years ago as a way to measure land and […]
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