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How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold

July 10, 2024

Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently.

What Is Machine Learning?

July 8, 2024

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.

What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?

July 3, 2024

If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In this week’s episode, mathematician Natalie Priebe Frank and co-host Janna Levin discuss how recent breakthroughs in tiling can unlock structural secrets in the natural world.

With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits

July 2, 2024

After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get.

Q&A

Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy

July 1, 2024

Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.

Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack?

June 28, 2024

Two mathematicians have proved a long-standing conjecture that is a step on the way toward finding the worst shape for packing the plane.

How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It

June 26, 2024

Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.

The Question of What’s Fair Illuminates the Question of What’s Hard

June 24, 2024

Computational complexity theorists have discovered a surprising new way to understand what makes certain problems hard.

How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number

June 21, 2024

Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined.

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