Archive
topology
Unimaginable Surfaces Discovered After Decades-Long Search
Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.
Quantized Columns
What Is the Langlands Program?
The Langlands program provides a beautifully intricate set of connections between various areas of mathematics, pointing the way toward novel solutions for old problems.
The Joy of Why
How Could Life Evolve From Cyanide?
How did life arise on Earth? Steven Strogatz speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak and Betül Kaçar, a paleogeneticist and astrobiologist, to explore our best understanding of how we all got here.
neural networks
How to Make the Universe Think for Us
Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universe’s complex physical behaviors.
Insights puzzle
The Secret Math Behind Mind-Reading Magic Tricks
Four puzzle solutions reveal different ways to divine someone’s hidden number with impossibly little information.
theoretical physics
Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder
The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.
Quantized Academy
Why Claude Shannon Would Have Been Great at Wordle
A bit of information theory can help you analyze — and improve — your Wordle game.
origins of life
Life’s First Peptides May Have Grown on RNA Strands
RNA and peptides coevolving in the primordial world might have jointly served as a precursor to the modern ribosome.
computational complexity
How Computer Scientists Learned to Reinvent the Proof
Why verify every line of a proof, when just a few checks will do?