Emily Buder

Leslie Lamport talks about the importance of programming instead of coding, how he developed distributed systems and his favorite algorithm.

Vijay Balasubramanian discusses the connections he sees between physics, computer science, neuroscience and literature and the humanities.

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz joins Quanta editor Thomas Lin for a conversation about teaching, writing and podcasting.

Trichoplax adhaerens is a species of placozoa, the simplest animals at the base of the tree of life. It doesn’t have a nervous system, yet it exhibits complex behaviors. How is this possible? The answer could shed light on the origins of the nervous system—and the future of robotics. “It’s a tour de force of biophysics,” said Orit Peleg of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, enjoys studying the math underlying everyday phenomena. “Mathematics is part of the creative world,” Ellenberg says. “We create things all the time.”

Celia Escamilla-Rivera is combining large data sets with supercomputers to test general relativity against its little-known competitors.

Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.

Puzzling particles, quirky (and controversial) quantum computers, and one of the most ambitious science experiments in history marked the year’s milestones.

The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.