When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Let’s start with what’s probably the most tired, overused joke in math: A topologist is someone who can’t tell a coffee cup from a doughnut. Both, you see, have a hole in them. Topology is […]
What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more quickly than physics does. But as with Einstein, Grothendieck’s impact […]
In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite […]
Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter […]
When an optometrist shines a bright light into your eyes, a vast, branching tree sprouts in your field of vision. This is the shadow of blood vessels. Though we normally can’t perceive them, these vessels […]
Mathematicians spend most of their time thinking about what’s knowable. But the unknowable can be just as compelling. Perhaps the most famous example comes from a theorem by the logician Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s celebrated result […]
In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The eruption started on June 12, and three days later it culminated in a tremendous explosion. By the time pyroclastic flows — incandescent […]
Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA’s Wind satellite, orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot […]
Living on light is a dangerous game. Not only do the sun’s rays carry ultraviolet waves that can snap DNA strands and degrade molecules, but they also vary wildly in intensity. Plants must endure and […]
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