quanta magazine
A Math Couple Solves a Major Group Theory Problem—After 20 Years of Work
But one of Malle’s graduate students was on the case. Britta Späth. “Our Obsession” In 2003, Späth arrived at the ...
Undergraduate Disproves 40-Year-Old Conjecture, Invents New Kind of Hash Table
In a 1985 paper, the computer scientist Andrew Yao, who would go on to win the A.M. Turing Award, asserted ...
New Proofs Expand the Limits of What Cannot Be Known
In other words, Hilbert’s 10th problem is undecidable. Mathematicians hoped to follow the same approach to prove the extended, rings-of-integers ...
This New Algorithm for Sorting Books or Files Is Close to Perfection
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard ...
Life on Earth Depends on Networks of Ocean Bacteria
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line ...
Scientists Recreate the Conditions That Sparked Complex Life
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in ...
There’s a New Way to Count Prime Numbers
But that wasn’t obvious. They’d have to analyze a special set of functions, called Type I and Type II sums, ...
New Superconductive Materials Have Just Been Discovered
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2024, superconductivity—the flow of electric current with zero resistance—was ...
Could Humans Have a Brain Microbiome?
The human gut microbiome plays a critical role in the body, communicating with the brain and maintaining the immune system ...
Viewers of Quantum Events Are Also Subject to Uncertainty
It gets better. What if B is also anchored to a quantum object that’s in a superposition of two locations? ...
