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Priyamvada Natarajan: How Black Holes Shape Galaxies
Priyamvada Natarajan explains the role of supermassive black holes in the structure and evolution of the universe.
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Can Large Language Models Understand ‘Meaning’?
Understanding Cryptography With These Five Worlds
How a New X-Ray Technique Sees Black Holes
The Math Hiding in Plain Sight
How AI Learns to ‘See’
How to Build a Telescope to See the Early Universe
When Computers Write Proofs, What’s the Point of Mathematicians?
The Cryptographer Working to Protect Computations
A Bet Against Quantum Gravity
The Digital Quest for Quantum Gravity
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Can Large Language Models Understand ‘Meaning’?
Brown University computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “understanding” and “meaning” into concrete ideas that are testable on LLMs.
Predicting Eclipses: The Three Body Problem
Solar eclipse prediction has driven innovation across the history of science and mathematics, from the Saros cycle to Greek geometry to Newton’s calculus to the three-body problem.
Understanding Cryptography With These Five Worlds
Russell Impagliazzo describes the five possible cryptographic worlds we might inhabit.
Why Is This Basic Computer Science Problem So Hard?
Computer scientists have long used vector addition systems to model how certain programs work, but they didn’t have a full understanding of how complicated they could be. Recent work has finally pinned it down, showing that these problems are far more complicated than they seem.
How a New X-Ray Technique Sees Black Holes
Astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons.
Decoding Math’s Most Famous Fractal
Mathematicians working in the field of complex dynamical systems are patiently unraveling the Mandelbrot set’s mysteries and may be on the verge of solving a fundamental conjecture that would allow them to describe the set completely.
The Math Hiding in Plain Sight
Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Math
In 2023, mathematicians improved bounds on Ramsey numbers, a central measure of order in graphs; found a new aperiodic monotile; and discovered a new upper bound to the size of sets without 3-term arithmetic progressions.
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics
In 2023, physicists found the gravitational wave background that’s made by supermassive black hole collisions, teleported quantum energy in the lab, and puzzled over JWST’s potentially cosmology-breaking discoveries.