A team of computer scientists has come up with a dramatically faster algorithm for one of the oldest problems in computer science: maximum flow. The problem asks how much material can flow through a network […]
Category: quantamagazine
From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of […]
As the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a well-known conjecture, […]
Our human brains can seem like a crowning achievement of evolution, but the roots of that achievement run deep: The modern brain arose from hundreds of millions of years of incremental advances in complexity. Evolutionary […]
Last July, two mathematicians from Durham University, Will Hide and Michael Magee, confirmed the existence of a much sought-after sequence of surfaces: each more complicated than the last, ultimately becoming so intricately connected with themselves […]
Not long ago, I was asked to explain the so-called Langlands program in a single tweet. Impossible, I immediately thought. It’s one of the biggest, most sweeping projects in mathematics, capable of connecting distant realms […]
How did life begin on Earth? It’s one of the greatest and most ancient mysteries in all of science — and the clues to solving it are all around us. Biologists have sometimes imagined evolutionary […]
Inside a soundproofed crate sits one of the world’s worst neural networks. After being presented with an image of the number 6, it pauses for a moment before identifying the digit: zero. Peter McMahon, the […]
In our most recent Insights puzzle, I challenged readers to figure out how certain magic tricks work. The tricks in question were of the sort where the magician somehow divines the identity of your hidden […]
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone […]
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