Mathematicians were disturbed, centuries ago, to find that calculating the properties of certain curves demanded the seemingly impossible: numbers that, when multiplied by themselves, turn negative. All the numbers on the number line, when squared, […]
I have a confession. As a producer working on the new season of the Joy of x podcast, sometimes I find myself editing episodes and thinking: Who let me in the room? It’s almost as […]
In the mid-1980s, the mathematician Jean Bourgain thought up a simple question about high-dimensional shapes. And then he remained stuck on it for the rest of his life. Bourgain, who died in 2018, was one […]
Viruses evolve. It’s what they do. That’s especially true for a pandemic virus like SARS-CoV-2, the one behind COVID-19. When a population lacks immunity and transmission is extensive, we expect viral mutations to appear frequently […]
It often goes unmentioned that protons, the positively charged matter particles at the center of atoms, are part antimatter. We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called […]
To climate scientists, clouds are powerful, pillowy paradoxes: They can simultaneously reflect away the sun’s heat but also trap it in the atmosphere; they can be products of warming temperatures but can also amplify their […]
Joseph Silverman remembers when he began connecting the dots that would ultimately lead to a new branch of mathematics: April 25, 1992, at a conference at Union College in Schenectady, New York. It happened by […]
In 2007, some of the leading thinkers behind deep neural networks organized an unofficial “satellite” meeting at the margins of a prestigious annual conference on artificial intelligence. The conference had rejected their request for an […]
When the first black hole collision was detected in 2015, it was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. With gravitational waves, astronomers were observing the universe in an entirely new way. But this […]
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