Click to tell Google to prioritize Quanta and see more of the best coverage of science and math in your search and AI results. There are an infinite number of infinities. Which one corresponds to the real numbers? In October…
The Riemann hypothesis is a fundamental statement about the distribution of prime numbers. The Riemann hypothesis has been an open problem for over 160 years. Resolving it would enable mathematicians to better understand the nature of prime numbers, one of math’s…
The computer scientist Moritz Hardt calls benchmarks “the mistake that made machine learning.” He’s studied where they went wrong, and why they’ve managed to drive progress anyway. Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As…
Lisett Ledon for Quanta Magazine Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT — “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk — it all starts, in some sense, with an…
In this update to Waddington’s image, a ball (representing a cell lineage) multiplies and specializes into cell types (represented by color) as it traverses a dynamic landscape. This animation was generated from Waddington’s original drawing using an AI tool. The…
Dor Minzer and his students recently rushed to post a milestone result in theoretical computer science, hoping to avoid being upstaged by a rumored AI proof. Courtesy of Dor Minzer Their decision to publish quickly was soon vindicated. On October…
In philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted. Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put…
Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine Sometimes Graham wore both hats at once. “It’s interesting, in fact, that many mathematicians and computer scientists have an interest in juggling,” he said in a 1980 television interview. “I think it’s the search for…
In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. If researchers could prove the existence of such a sandwich, they wouldn’t just be showing that the middle graph has one property of interest; they’d be showing that it has all…
Quantum mechanics may be one of the most precisely tested paradigms in science, but there’s still no universally accepted interpretation of what it tells us about reality. How do we get from the wave-like behavior of quantum systems to the…
Mathematics and computer-science stories from Quanta Magazine: new proofs, open problems, explainers, prizes and AI in mathematics.
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