In 1850, Thomas Penyngton Kirkman, a mathematician when he wasn’t fulfilling his main responsibility as a vicar in the Church of England, described his “schoolgirl problem”: “Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out three […]
Tag: quantamagazine
How can anyone speak with certainty about infinity? What can we really know about the mysterious prime numbers without knowing all of them? Just as scientists need data to assess their hypotheses, mathematicians need evidence […]
More than a century after Albert Einstein unveiled general relativity, his epic theory of gravity has passed every experimental test to which it has been subjected. General relativity has transformed our understanding of gravity, depicting […]
One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time into an organism with diverse tissues, each with its own unique […]
In 1994, a mathematician figured out how make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of quantum mechanics could […]
By the time he was 17, Mark Braverman had lived in three countries and spoke as many languages. But though he doesn’t have a hometown, he’s quick to call theoretical computer science his home. “Theoretical […]
In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the […]
The math department at the University of Geneva is usually quiet and still — that is, except when voices boom down the hall from the office of Hugo Duminil-Copin, a not infrequent occurrence. “We were […]
June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through […]
In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician — Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, […]
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