You are looking for
Advanced search
Getting Into Shapes: From Hyperbolic Geometry to Cube Complexes and Back
Thirty years ago, the mathematician William Thurston articulated a grand vision: a taxonomy of all possible finite three-dimensional shapes. Thurston, a Fields medalist who spent much of his career at...
As Supersymmetry Fails Tests, Physicists Seek New Ideas
As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more...
A Primordial Nucleus Behind the Elements of Life
Billions of years ago, all of Earth’s carbon erupted into existence inside distant, dying stars. At first, each atom’s nucleus arose in a swollen, squashed state with little chance of...
Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data
In 1997, when Massachusetts began making health records of state employees available to medical researchers, the government removed patients’ names, addresses, and Social Security numbers. William Weld, then the governor,...
Classical Computing Embraces Quantum Ideas
Someday, quantum computers may be able to solve complex optimization problems, quickly mine huge data sets, simulate the kind of physics experiments that currently require billion-dollar particle accelerators, and accomplish...
Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire
Alice and Bob, beloved characters of various thought experiments in quantum mechanics, are at a crossroads. The adventurous, rather reckless Alice jumps into a very large black hole, leaving a...
Hunger Game: Is Honesty Between Animals Always the Best Policy?
Imagine you’re a puny peacock, rendered weak by bad genes or poor nutrition. You hope to attract a peahen, who mainly cares about the length of your tail. Growing a...
Computer Scientists Take Road Less Traveled
Not long ago, a team of researchers from Stanford and McGill universities broke a 35-year record in computer science by an almost imperceptible margin — four hundredths of a trillionth...
In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge
In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange...