Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago. He was trying to calculate the odds that three jets of elementary particles would erupt […]
Tag: quantamagazine
If you’ve ever had to buy hot dogs for a cookout, you might have found yourself solving a math problem involving least common multiples. Setting aside the age-old question of why hot dogs usually come […]
For her senior thesis at Princeton University, Ana Caraiani was given a challenging problem from her adviser, the mathematician Andrew Wiles. He’d recently garnered fame for his 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but Caraiani […]
In 1994, Peter Shor, a mathematician then at Bell Labs in New Jersey, proved that a quantum computer would have the power to solve some problems exponentially faster than a classical machine. The question was: […]
How our brain, a three-pound mass of tissue encased within a bony skull, creates perceptions from sensations is a long-standing mystery. Abundant evidence and decades of sustained research suggest that the brain cannot simply be […]
Newton’s third law tells us that for every action, there’s an equal reaction going the opposite way. It’s been reassuring us for 400 years, explaining why we don’t fall through the floor (the floor pushes […]
For over 20 years, physicists have had reason to feel envious of certain fictional fish: specifically, the fish inhabiting the fantastic space of M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III woodcut, which shrink to points as they […]
When you deposit a quarter and turn the crank on a gumball machine, the flavor you receive is basically random. In math, sometimes a polynomial, like x2 + y2, works the same way. When you […]
Dogs that habitually hear a bell at chow time become classically conditioned to drool at the mere chime, as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed in the 1890s: Their brains learn to associate the bell with […]
When the first sponge genomes were sequenced in the early 2000s, researchers were surprised to find that sponges not only have roughly as many genes as humans and other complex creatures but also have many […]
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