“There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.” Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like […]
“There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.” Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like […]
Cynthia Chiang always wanted to work with her hands. Although it may sound counterintuitive, it’s what led her to the fairly abstract field of observational cosmology: studying the cosmos’s origin and development by gathering data […]
The tools of artificial intelligence — neural networks in particular — have been good to physicists. For years, this technology has helped researchers reconstruct particle trajectories in accelerator experiments, search for evidence of new particles, […]
Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce […]
Understanding the quantum universe is not an easy thing. Intuitive notions of space and time break down in the tiny realm of subatomic physics, allowing for behavior that seems, to our macro sensibilities, downright weird. […]
For ecologists, tropical rainforests hold many enigmas. A single hectare can contain hundreds of tree species, far more than in forests closer to the poles. Somehow these species coexist in such dizzying abundance that, as […]
In mathematics, a simple problem is often not what it seems. Earlier this summer, Quanta reported on one such problem: What is the smallest area that you can sweep out while rotating an infinitely thin […]
In 1935, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, got into a dispute over the nature of reality. Einstein had done the math and knew that the universe […]
In 1935, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, got into a dispute over the nature of reality. Einstein had done the math and knew that the universe […]
Consider a square with a bunch of points inside. Take three of those points, and you can make a triangle. Four points define four different triangles. Ten points define 120 triangles. The numbers grow quickly […]
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