There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half […]
Category: quantamagazine
A fruit bat hanging in the corner of a cave stirs; it is ready to move. It scans the space to look for a free perch and then takes flight, adjusting its membranous wings to […]
Every day we see examples of repeating motifs. This symmetry and regularity can seem mundane and almost invisible, as with brickwork on building walls or the hexagonal pattern in a honeycomb. Or if we’re lucky […]
More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues to reverberate through mathematics today. His idea was to identify all the primes up to […]
Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical — except one wasn’t a video at […]
When Alexei Efros moved with his family from Russia to California as a teenager in the 1980s, he brought his Soviet-built personal computer, an Elektronika BK-0010. The machine had no external storage and overheated every […]
A tree has something in common with the weeds and mushrooms growing around its roots, the squirrels scurrying up its trunk, the birds perched on its branches, and the photographer taking pictures of the scene. […]
It’s been more than 40 years since the physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that building computing devices based on quantum principles could unlock powers far greater than those of “classical” computers. In a 1981 keynote […]
A brain is nothing if not communicative. Neurons are the chatterboxes of this conversational organ, and they speak with one another by exchanging pulses of electricity using chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. By repeating this process […]
Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited the […]
Recent Comments