Warning: This article includes snippets of AI-generated content that may offend some readers. There should have been nothing wrong with the chatbot except for its poor programming ability. Yet something was amiss. “Tell me three […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Water is the most fundamental need for all life on Earth. Not every organism needs oxygen, and many make their own food. But for all creatures, from deep-sea microbes and slime molds to trees and […]
“Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!” a physicist bellowed into a microphone one evening in June, and the cavernous banquet hall of Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic erupted into cheers and applause. Some 300 quantum physicists had traveled […]
Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into […]
If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has […]
All the activity on Earth’s surface — erupting volcanoes, shifting tectonic plates, restless seas and myriad forms of life — depends on the two-part engine under the hood. Directly beneath Earth’s crust lies the mantle: […]
It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on […]
In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when […]
In 1971, Fan Chung, then in her second year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, received an assignment. Her thesis adviser, Herbert Wilf, asked her to read the proof of a problem in […]
Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of […]
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