Alice and Bob, the stars of so many thought experiments, are cooking dinner when mishaps ensue. Alice accidentally drops a plate; the sound startles Bob, who burns himself on the stove and cries out. In […]
Alice and Bob, the stars of so many thought experiments, are cooking dinner when mishaps ensue. Alice accidentally drops a plate; the sound startles Bob, who burns himself on the stove and cries out. In […]
In 2018, astronomers were shocked to find a bizarre explosion in a galaxy 200 million light-years away. It wasn’t like any normal supernova seen before — it was both briefer and brighter. The event was […]
People often feel that they can intuitively recognize whether something is alive, but nature is filled with entities that flout easy categorization as life or non-life — and the challenge may intensify as other planets […]
Grade school math students are likely familiar with teachers admonishing them not to just guess the answer to a problem. But a new proof establishes that, in fact, the right kind of guessing is sometimes […]
The mathematics community lost a titan with the passing last month of Isadore “Is” Singer. Born in Detroit in 1924, Is was a visionary, transcending divisions between fields of mathematics as well as those between […]
Mathematicians were disturbed, centuries ago, to find that calculating the properties of certain curves demanded the seemingly impossible: numbers that, when multiplied by themselves, turn negative. All the numbers on the number line, when squared, […]
I have a confession. As a producer working on the new season of the Joy of x podcast, sometimes I find myself editing episodes and thinking: Who let me in the room? It’s almost as […]
In the mid-1980s, the mathematician Jean Bourgain thought up a simple question about high-dimensional shapes. And then he remained stuck on it for the rest of his life. Bourgain, who died in 2018, was one […]
Viruses evolve. It’s what they do. That’s especially true for a pandemic virus like SARS-CoV-2, the one behind COVID-19. When a population lacks immunity and transmission is extensive, we expect viral mutations to appear frequently […]
It often goes unmentioned that protons, the positively charged matter particles at the center of atoms, are part antimatter. We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called […]
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