All the activity on Earth’s surface — erupting volcanoes, shifting tectonic plates, restless seas and myriad forms of life — depends on the two-part engine under the hood. Directly beneath Earth’s crust lies the mantle: […]
Category: quantamagazine
It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on […]
In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when […]
In 1971, Fan Chung, then in her second year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, received an assignment. Her thesis adviser, Herbert Wilf, asked her to read the proof of a problem in […]
Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of […]
Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final […]
Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body. You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen […]
There are precision measurements, and then there’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In each of LIGO’s twin gravitational wave detectors (one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), laser beams bounce back and […]
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said […]
In October 2015, a young mathematician named Clemens Sämann was flying home to Austria from a conference in Turin, Italy, when he had a chance encounter. He found himself seated beside Michael Kunzinger, another conference […]
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