The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. …
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key …
Nine-year-old Lucas Mason Yao loves the Vancouver Canucks, his pet bunny Chomp and pi, the mathematical constant that’s celebrated every March 14 around the world. Yao, from Pitt Meadows, B.C., …
Ducati, maker of high-performance engines with fancy valvetrains, has a new high-performance engine with a fancy valvetrain. The unique feature with this one is that it’s a mere single cylinder, …
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating …