In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the […]
Category: quantamagazine
The math department at the University of Geneva is usually quiet and still — that is, except when voices boom down the hall from the office of Hugo Duminil-Copin, a not infrequent occurrence. “We were […]
June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through […]
In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician — Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, […]
The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy […]
History is full of backstabbing rivalries: Edison and Tesla, Harding and Kerrigan, Tupac and Biggie. No less dramatic was a 16th-century conflict between Italian mathematicians Gerolamo Cardano, a brilliant but troubled polymath, and Niccolò Fontana, […]
How do you teach mathematics to an artificial intelligence? AI has already bested humans at problem-solving tasks that include games like chess and Go. But before any task can be tackled by a machine, it […]
It sounds like one of the easiest experiments possible: Take two cups of water, one hot, one cold. Place both in a freezer and note which one freezes first. Common sense suggests that the colder […]
The aging brains of people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are suffused with tell-tale aggregates of proteins in or around their neurons. How these protein clumps might be harming the neurons is often […]
Balance-scale puzzles abound in recreational mathematics. The essential element is the humble two-pan balance scale — a staple of commerce over the millennia that’s still found in bustling rural bazaars in the developing world. The […]
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