In early June, buzz built as mathematicians landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Their destination was the University of Oxford and a conference in honor of the 65th birthday of Michael Hopkins, a mathematician at Harvard […]
In early June, buzz built as mathematicians landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Their destination was the University of Oxford and a conference in honor of the 65th birthday of Michael Hopkins, a mathematician at Harvard […]
Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant — a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the […]
In the first week of the fall semester in 2007, Marco Carmosino dragged himself to a math class required for all computer science majors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Carmosino, a sophomore, was considering […]
The modern notion of a black hole has been with us since February 1916, three months after Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of gravity. That’s when the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, in the midst of fighting […]
Every organism responds to the world with an intricate cascade of biochemistry. There’s a source of heat here, a faint scent of food there, or the crack of a twig as something moves nearby. Each […]
Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — […]
Optimization problems can be tricky, but they make the world work better. These kinds of questions, which strive for the best way of doing something, are absolutely everywhere. Your phone’s GPS calculates the shortest route […]
Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer had high hopes for their summer research project. Blindsiding an entire subfield of mathematics was not one of them. In May, Haag was finishing her first year of graduate school […]
Summer Haag and Clyde Kertzer had high hopes for their summer research project. Blindsiding an entire subfield of mathematics was not one of them. In May, Haag was finishing her first year of graduate school […]
Seven years ago, researchers showed that they could strip cells down to their barest fundamentals, creating a life form with the smallest genome that still allowed it to grow and divide in the lab. But […]
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