Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by what […]
Category: quantamagazine
You don’t typically build a machine without understanding how it works. But for artificial intelligence researchers building large language models, understanding is about the one thing they haven’t achieved. In fact, sometimes their work feels […]
Scott Bolton’s first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of […]
When she was 10 years old, Rose Yu got a birthday present that would change her life — and, potentially, the way we study physics. Her uncle got her a computer. That was a rare […]
Biofilms lead lives of liminality. Just a few cells thick, these layered communities of microbes anchor themselves to solid surfaces at interfaces — where rocks meet salt water in tide pools, between plants and dirt […]
It started with a bet. In the late 1980s, at a conference in Lausanne, the mathematicians Noga Alon and Peter Sarnak got into a friendly debate. Both were studying collections of nodes and edges called […]
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the microscopic world, and general relativity, which describes the macroscopic world of gravity […]
Like many proud parents, David Ginty has decorated his office with pictures of his genetic creations. There’s the prickly one sporting a spiked collar and the wannabe cowboy twirling a lasso. There’s the dramatic one, […]
Language isn’t always necessary. While it certainly helps in getting across certain ideas, some neuroscientists have argued that many forms of human thought and reasoning don’t require the medium of words and grammar. Sometimes, the […]
On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zihyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started […]
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