In 1886 the mathematician Leopold Kronecker famously said, “God Himself made the whole numbers — everything else is the work of men.” Indeed, mathematicians have introduced new sets of numbers besides the ones used to […]
Category: quantamagazine
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of forest on […]
If someone asks you to determine whether two objects are the same, it might seem like a trivial request. In most everyday cases, a quick glance is enough for you to render an accurate judgment. […]
It has been an exhilarating year in combinatorics research. In early 2023, mathematicians were stunned when two of the biggest problems in the field were solved in as many months. Now, a third major question […]
On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and […]
Enough pints of beer can have you falling off your bar stool or loudly reciting lyrics to early 2000s jams to total strangers, because alcohol can get past one of the strongest defenses in the […]
On a sunny day in late 1987, a Chevy van drove down a curvy wooded path on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The hulking vehicle, named Navlab, wasn’t notable for its beauty […]
As with so much in mathematics, the proof started with coffee. In September 2019, Kathryn Mann of Cornell University visited Kingston, Ontario, to give a guest lecture at Queen’s University. Afterward, she sat down with […]
Sailors have spun yarns for centuries about gigantic rogue waves that could suddenly come out of nowhere to capsize the ships of unwary mariners. Scientists didn’t believe them because the stories seemed at odds with […]
In April, researchers in China reported that they had initiated pregnancies in monkeys through a procedure seemingly much like in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which embryos created in a dish were implanted in the uteruses […]
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