The grandest project in mathematics has received a rare gift, in the form of a mammoth 350-page paper posted in February that will change the way researchers around the world investigate some of the field’s […]
The grandest project in mathematics has received a rare gift, in the form of a mammoth 350-page paper posted in February that will change the way researchers around the world investigate some of the field’s […]
Recently, Quanta has explored the collaboration between physics and mathematics on one of the most important ideas in science: quantum field theory. The basic objects of a quantum field theory are quantum fields, which spread […]
In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car window as his girlfriend drove them to their bed-and-breakfast, when it came to him: the missing step of what’s now a […]
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired legions of computer scientists in 1979, but few were as inspired as Melanie Mitchell. After reading the 777-page tome, Mitchell, a high school math teacher in New […]
All life on Earth rests on the same foundation: a four-letter genetic alphabet spelling out a repertoire of three-letter words that specify 20 amino acids. These basic building blocks — the components of DNA and […]
For more than 50 years, mathematicians have been searching for a rigorous way to prove that an unusually strong symmetry is universal across physical systems at the mysterious juncture where they’re changing from one state […]
For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength […]
During his doctoral research on the ties between aging and mitochondria, Martin Picard frequently saw micrographs of those energy-producing organelles. Yet it wasn’t until fairly late in his graduate work that he first watched sped-up […]
Understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the population means knowing more than just the total number of infections and deaths. As with many diseases, after the acute infection has passed, a constellation of […]
In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly unexpected. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed brief […]
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