Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the mathematical stakes are high, as with the Riemann hypothesis, whose solution comes with a […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Deep in the Caucasus Mountains, on the border between Russia and Georgia, an unusual experiment is taking place. In an underground lab shielded by a mountain of rock, highly radioactive material sits inside a vat […]
In the fall of 2014, Andrew Wilson took a front-row seat in Ken Ono’s number theory class at Emory University in Atlanta. Wilson was not only double majoring in applied math and physics, he was […]
By now, many people think they know what machine learning is: You “feed” computers a bunch of “training data” so that they “learn” to do things without our having to specify exactly how. But computers […]
In the tiling of wallpaper and bathroom floors, collective repeated patterns often emerge. Mathematicians have long tried to find a tiling shape that never repeats in this way. In 2023, they lauded an unexpected amateur […]
Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind […]
Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden hand at play: magnetism. “There’s this fantastic quote: You can […]
For centuries, mathematicians suspected that hexagonal tiles are the best possible way to fill space. By this they mean that if you want to subdivide a large area into tiles of equal size while minimizing […]
In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a […]
Theoretical computer scientists deal with complicated ideas. But whenever possible, they’d prefer to work with simpler ones. A 2009 tool known as the regularity lemma gives them a great way to do this. It effectively […]
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