To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on, you must first grind a mirror as big as a house. Its surface must be so smooth that, if […]
Category: quantamagazine
Quantum computers, enthusiasts forecast, will one day work no end of miracles — from breaking digital encryptions to designing wonder drugs. At this early stage, however, the advantage of many quantum algorithms remains speculative. And […]
As the end of the year approaches, we are nearing the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, over 5 million have died, and that’s almost certainly an undercount, especially in countries that still lack […]
I met up with Jay Roberts in what had been the parking lot of hell. On that warm morning last September in the heart of Sonoma’s wine country, it was just another dusty stretch of […]
Last month, we presented three puzzles that seemed ordinary enough but contained a numerical twist. Hidden below the surface was the mysterious transcendental number e. Most familiar as the base of natural logarithms, Euler’s number […]
Suppose you are trying to transmit a message. Convert each character into bits, and each bit into a signal. Then send it, over copper or fiber or air. Try as you might to be as […]
An elegant ballet of proteins enables modern cells to replicate themselves. During cell division, structural proteins and enzymes coordinate the duplication of DNA, the division of a cell’s cytoplasmic contents, and the cinching of the […]
Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago. He was trying to calculate the odds that three jets of elementary particles would erupt […]
If you’ve ever had to buy hot dogs for a cookout, you might have found yourself solving a math problem involving least common multiples. Setting aside the age-old question of why hot dogs usually come […]
For her senior thesis at Princeton University, Ana Caraiani was given a challenging problem from her adviser, the mathematician Andrew Wiles. He’d recently garnered fame for his 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but Caraiani […]
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