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How Public Key Cryptography Really Works, Using Only Simple Math
...invisible ink: One encrypts messages, the other decrypts them. But instead of using chemicals, public key cryptography uses mathematical puzzles called trapdoor functions. These functions are easy to compute in...
2024 Biggest Breakthroughs in Math
We investigate three of 2024’s biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, including a better way to pack spheres in high dimensions, a new way to avoid forming patterns of numbers, and an...
One Step Closer to a ‘Grand Unified Theory of Math’: Geometric Langlands
After 30 years of effort, mathematicians finally proved a major component of the ambitious Langlands program. Christopher Webb Young/Quanta Magazine; Kelsey Houston-Edwards for Quanta Magazine...
A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting
...to mean curvature flow. Should a singularity appear, the flow can go on — making it possible for mathematicians to assess the surface’s evolution. Over the past few decades, mathematicians...
What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics?
...phenomenon that occurs. So it’s not just that mathematics, that [what] mathematicians find intellectually interesting end up being physically important. But even within mathematics, subjects that mathematicians find elegant also...
Corina Tarnita and the Deep Mathematics of Social Insects
...hear her on, on math, but she’s made this amazing transition from being an all-out high-power mathematician to now becoming an all-out high-power biologist. She goes to Africa, she’s mucking...
In Mathematics, ‘You Cannot Be Lied To’
...first. Born and raised in Paris, Serfaty first became intrigued by mathematics in high school. Ultimately she gravitated toward physics problems, constructing mathematical tools to forecast what should happen in...
Science Evolves. Will Science Education?
...New Math, Unlike the Old Math,” about new math and science standards working their way into America’s schools, and writing about Channa Comer, one of four extraordinary teachers profiled in...
After Prime Proof, an Unlikely Star Rises
...of a mathematician? Intuition. Your feelings in math. What is that? It’s difficult to tell other people. That’s your personal stuff. Some of the big awards in math, particularly the...