Computer Science

Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.

Researchers have discovered ways around a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and beauty in digital images.

How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.

A new result shows how much of the plane can be colored by points that are never exactly one unit apart.

A new algorithm brings together the advantages of randomness and deterministic processes to reliably construct large prime numbers.

A new paper finds a faster method for determining when two mathematical groups are the same.