In a recent paper, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has settled an 85-year-old conjecture about one of math’s most ancient obsessions: the solutions to polynomial equations such as x2 – 3x + 2 = 0. […]
Category: quantamagazine
We’ve heard a lot about the immune system over the last couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but of course our immune system fights off much more than the coronavirus. And while the immune […]
In 1989, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, popularizer of the term “black hole,” proposed a radical new way to think about the universe. Quantum particles may shape-shift and disappear, but we can always count on […]
Playing the mating game is risky. Organisms must cope with the existential risk that swiping right on the wrong choice could doom future generations to a lifetime of bad genes. They also have to contend […]
Many computer scientists focus on overcoming hard computational problems. But there’s one area of computer science in which hardness is an asset: cryptography, where you want hard obstacles between your adversaries and your secrets. Unfortunately, […]
In the last two years, artificial intelligence programs have reached a surprising level of linguistic fluency. The biggest and best of these are all based on an architecture invented in 2017 called the transformer. It […]
In August 1883, a mountainous island in Indonesia named Krakatau, or Krakatoa, self-destructed. Episodic volcanic eruptions crescendoed in an explosion that sent debris 80 kilometers high and smothered 800,000 square kilometers of Earth’s surface in […]
For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to “blow up” some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a […]
As wildly diverse as life on Earth is — whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot […]
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or […]
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