On a summer night in the Bay of Naples, hordes of worms swam upward from the seagrass toward the water’s surface under the light of a waning moon. Not long before, the creatures began a […]
On a summer night in the Bay of Naples, hordes of worms swam upward from the seagrass toward the water’s surface under the light of a waning moon. Not long before, the creatures began a […]
In 2008, the mathematician Oded Schramm died in a hiking accident in the Cascade mountains some 50 miles east of Seattle. Though he was just 46 years old, he had constructed entirely new areas of […]
In our increasingly digital lives, security depends on cryptography. Send a private message or pay a bill online, and you’re relying on algorithms designed to keep your data secret. Naturally, some people want to uncover […]
In the 16th century, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius created the world’s first modern atlas — a collection of maps that he called “The Theater of the World.” The maps, drawn by Ortelius and others, […]
Most people are only familiar with a handful of numbers that can’t be written as fractions, like $latex sqrt{2}$ or $latex pi$. But such numbers, called irrational numbers, are far more plentiful than fractions or […]
On December 11, 2021, a beam of gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — slammed into NASA’s Swift satellite. Within 120 seconds, the satellite had swiveled toward the blast and spotted the […]
Erin Calipari comes from a basketball family. Her father, John Calipari, has coached college and professional basketball since 1998, leading six teams to the NCAA Final Four, and her brother coaches men’s basketball at Vanderbilt […]
In a randomly chosen set of numbers, addition can go wild. Add together every pair from such a set, and you’ll end up with a new list that’s likely to have a lot more numbers […]
Before Erwin Schrödinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and before pointlike electrons washed like waves through thin slits, a somewhat lesser-known experiment lifted the veil on the bewildering beauty of the quantum world. In […]
It’s not often that 5-year-olds can grasp questions at the frontiers of computer science, but it can happen. Suppose, for instance, that a kindergartner named Alice has two apples, but she prefers oranges. Fortunately, her […]
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