Category: quantamagazine

In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms — which, despite their name, don’t necessarily involve […]

In mathematics, simple rules can unlock universes of complexity and beauty. Take the famous Fibonacci sequence, which is defined as follows: It begins with 1 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of […]

When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 […]

When you were a child, it seemed like an ingenious plan: Splash hot water on your face and stagger into the kitchen, letting out a moan that could make angels cry. One touch of your […]

When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw — more than 500 new stars in the […]

More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful of black beans […]

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to […]

If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a rainy afternoon, you’ve probably watched raindrops racing each other down the car window. When pairs of droplets collide, they merge into a new droplet, losing their […]

We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for […]

For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle. But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was […]