A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building blocks, the prime numbers. […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Mathematicians and computer scientists had an exciting year of breakthroughs in set theory, topology and artificial intelligence, in addition to preserving fading knowledge and revisiting old questions. They made new progress on fundamental questions in […]
One of the first articles Quanta Magazine published in 2021 described a cosmic surprise: A long-puzzling smudge of X-ray light was not, as most believed, a nearby cloud of gas, the remnant of some long-ago […]
Three and a half billion years of evolution have given life on Earth plenty of time to explore the margins of what’s possible, so biological science has a lot of catching up to do. Biologists […]
During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes’ detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen […]
Remember IBM’s Watson, the AI Jeopardy! champion? A 2010 promotion proclaimed, “Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity.” However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to “revolutionize […]
The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as […]
Back in 2020, Cristen Willer, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was leading her laboratory on a search for the genetic underpinnings of an often deadly heart condition […]
Back in 2020, Cristen Willer, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was leading her laboratory on a search for the genetic underpinnings of an often deadly heart condition […]
The latest attempt to rattle the foundations of cosmology appeared as a smattering of dots pulled upward into a cosmic sneer. The arc of distant galaxies, which Alexia Lopez presented at the American Astronomical Society’s […]
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