When Thomas Hummel gets a whiff of an unripe, green tomato, he finds himself in his childhood home in Bavaria. Under the tilted ceilings of the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, […]
Tag: quantamagazine
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) may not glitter quite like the night sky, plunked as it is between Michigan State University’s chemistry department and the performing arts center. Inside, though, the lab is […]
We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text and compose sonnets. This has been […]
The natural world is awash with color, and many of these vibrant hues are meant to be seen. Apples blush red to coax animals to spread their seeds, lavender blooms are violet to lure in […]
Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in mathematics. It studies relationships through nodes (vertices) and the links […]
In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately became important objects of mathematical study. So it might be surprising that, millennia later, mysteries […]
Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just […]
Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while […]
For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish. It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the […]
For decades, ecologists have puzzled over a mystery: Why do some natural habitats get overrun by invasive species while others seem to repel outside threats? In a classic 1958 book on the subject, the ecologist […]
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