Near midnight on March 26, 1961, dark waters lapped at the hull of a converted naval barge as it queasily rocked in the Pacific Ocean. The ship had just arrived at this spot, some 240 […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Lenore Blum’s long career has spanned the breadth of mathematics and computer science. She’s done influential work in logic and cryptography, and she formulated an entirely new model of computation. And though she didn’t set […]
James Stroud had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little […]
Earth’s fate rests on a coin flip. In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” said Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University […]
On a summer night in the Bay of Naples, hordes of worms swam upward from the seagrass toward the water’s surface under the light of a waning moon. Not long before, the creatures began a […]
In 2008, the mathematician Oded Schramm died in a hiking accident in the Cascade mountains some 50 miles east of Seattle. Though he was just 46 years old, he had constructed entirely new areas of […]
In our increasingly digital lives, security depends on cryptography. Send a private message or pay a bill online, and you’re relying on algorithms designed to keep your data secret. Naturally, some people want to uncover […]
In the 16th century, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius created the world’s first modern atlas — a collection of maps that he called “The Theater of the World.” The maps, drawn by Ortelius and others, […]
Most people are only familiar with a handful of numbers that can’t be written as fractions, like $latex sqrt{2}$ or $latex pi$. But such numbers, called irrational numbers, are far more plentiful than fractions or […]
On December 11, 2021, a beam of gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — slammed into NASA’s Swift satellite. Within 120 seconds, the satellite had swiveled toward the blast and spotted the […]
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