If you’ve been following the math news this month, you know that the 35-year-old number theorist James Maynard won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician. Maynard likes math questions that “are […]
Category: quantamagazine
Stripes of gas wind and wrap through the darkness, twisting into knots that are poised to collapse into stars. And it all happens in the palm of Nia Imara’s hand. The stormy clouds of gas […]
When Fu-Shuang Li, a biochemist and research scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, needed some pollen for his research, he knew just where to go. Every spring, the pitch pine trees ringing Walden […]
A striking new proof in quantum computational complexity might best be understood with a playful thought experiment. Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip […]
In 1850, Thomas Penyngton Kirkman, a mathematician when he wasn’t fulfilling his main responsibility as a vicar in the Church of England, described his “schoolgirl problem”: “Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out three […]
How can anyone speak with certainty about infinity? What can we really know about the mysterious prime numbers without knowing all of them? Just as scientists need data to assess their hypotheses, mathematicians need evidence […]
More than a century after Albert Einstein unveiled general relativity, his epic theory of gravity has passed every experimental test to which it has been subjected. General relativity has transformed our understanding of gravity, depicting […]
One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time into an organism with diverse tissues, each with its own unique […]
In 1994, a mathematician figured out how make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of quantum mechanics could […]
By the time he was 17, Mark Braverman had lived in three countries and spoke as many languages. But though he doesn’t have a hometown, he’s quick to call theoretical computer science his home. “Theoretical […]
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