The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. […]
Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine […]
For evolutionary biologists, what most distinguishes the marine creatures called cnidarians and ctenophores is not the peculiar spelling of their names, nor the fact that they tend to be beautiful, but that they are among […]
The amplituhedron is a geometric shape with an almost mystical quality: Compute its volume, and you get the answer to a central calculation in physics about how particles interact. Now, a young mathematician at Cornell […]
Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, […]
If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat flows spontaneously from hotter bodies to colder ones. But now, gently and almost casually, Alexssandre de Oliveira […]
From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s hand came branches and whorls, spines and webs. Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the distinctiveness and diversity […]
In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: […]
These days, large language models such as ChatGPT are omnipresent. Yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. To Naomi Saphra, that’s an unsatisfying state of affairs. “We don’t know what makes a language model tick,” […]
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