David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard, or painting […]
Tag: quantamagazine
For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended […]
Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as […]
In August, a pair of mathematicians discovered an exotic, record-breaking curve. In doing so, they tapped into a major open question about one of the oldest and most fundamental kinds of equations in mathematics. Elliptic […]
In February 2023, Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Bard claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured the first image of a planet outside our solar system. It hadn’t. When researchers from Purdue University asked […]
Scientists routinely build quantitative models — of, say, the weather or an epidemic — and then use them to make predictions, which they can then test against the real thing. This work can reveal how […]
In a lab nestled between the jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps, rare earth metals vaporize and spew out of an oven at the speed of a fighter jet. Then a medley of lasers and […]
Say you live in an old house, and you want to make a slew of renovations; at some point, the most efficient way forward is to build a new house altogether. A similar clean-slate approach […]
Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture; a statement might […]
Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size […]
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