It is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond recognition. […]
It is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond recognition. […]
If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option — they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property […]
On a recent October morning, Rob Kirby stood in front of a roomful of mathematicians and told them not to feel bound by the way he’d done things in the past. For the past half-century […]
In Cassandra Extavour’s office at Harvard University hangs a placard with a painted rainbow flag and a friendly invitation. “You are welcome here,” it reads. “I have it up because I think it’s important to […]
On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She […]
It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. […]
Play Quanta Magazine’s daily interactive math game, Hyperjumps! The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine Click to rate this post! [Total: 0 Average: 0]You have already voted for this article
In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits […]
We often talk about evolution in terms of competition, as the survival of the fittest. But if it is, then where did the widespread (and widely admired) impulse to help others even at great cost […]
The discovery during the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s that we humans have only about 20,000 protein-coding genes — about as many as the tiny soil-dwelling nematode worm, and less than half as […]
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