In mid-November of last year, David Smith, a retired print technician and an aficionado of jigsaw puzzles, fractals and road maps, was doing one of his favorite things: playing with shapes. Using a software package […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first general-purpose […]
All animals, plants, fungi and protists — which collectively make up the domain of life called eukaryotes — have genomes with a peculiar feature that has puzzled researchers for almost half a century: Their genes […]
One of the great episodes in the history of mathematics began on October 23, 1852. In a letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Augustus De Morgan wrote, “A student of mine asked me today to […]
For around 20 years, astronomers have struggled to find an ancient group of stars mixed in with the gas, dust and newer stars of our galaxy’s bulge. These “fossil” stars preceded the Milky Way and […]
“For me, mathematics exists in the space between us,” Emmy Murphy wrote in accepting the 2020 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize. That space, for her, is a realm of art, perhaps even more than science. […]
Think of the tune to “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Now sing these lyrics: Neg-a-tive b, plus or minus The square root of b squared mi-nus four a c All! over two a This jingle has […]
In January 2022, a small team of physicists watched breathlessly as data streamed out of Google’s quantum computer, Sycamore. A sharp peak indicated that their experiment had succeeded. They had mixed one unit of quantum […]
Bob Metcalfe has always been a believer in the power of networking. In the 1980s and 1990s he helped popularize the idea that a network’s value grows rapidly with the number of users, a precept […]
On Sunday, February 5, Olof Sisask and Thomas Bloom received an email containing a stunning breakthrough on the biggest unsolved problem in their field. Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, […]
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