Interviews

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The 17-Year-Old Student Who Solved a Major Math Mystery

When Hannah Cairo was a 17-year-old high school student, she did something mathematicians had been unable to do for four decades: she overturned the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a famous prediction about how wave energy behaves. In this video, Cairo and the mathematicians she worked with explain how she found the counterexample and what it means for the field.


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Pencils Down: Aaron Mathieu of Acton-Boxborough Regional High School

October 11, 2016

Students need a chance to fail at science to learn about its process, says Aaron Mathieu.

Pencils Down: Channa Comer Teaching About Scientific Controls

October 11, 2016

What’s a control? Channa Comer challenges her students to explain and work things out for themselves.

Pencils Down: The Art of Teaching Math and Science

October 11, 2016

What can we learn from the best teachers on the front lines? To shine a spotlight on this linchpin of our education system, Quanta Magazine followed four master science and math teachers into their classrooms.

Peter and Rosemary Grant: Watching Evolution Happen in Two Lifetimes

September 22, 2016

Peter and Rosemary Grant explain how our understanding of evolution has changed in their lifetimes.

Tracy Slatyer: A Seeker of Dark Matter’s Hidden Light

September 1, 2016

Tracy Slatyer explains why she’s not disappointed when a mysterious cosmic signal turns out to be something other than dark matter.

Miranda Cheng: A Moonshine Master Toys With String Theory

August 4, 2016

Miranda Cheng explains what umbral moonshine is and how it might illuminate string theory.

How Does Life Come From Randomness?

June 30, 2016

David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life.

Suchitra Sebastian: An Explorer of Quantum Borderlands

June 9, 2016

Suchitra Sebastian talks about how extreme conditions can create unexpected quantum behavior.

Ken Ono: A Life Inspired by an Unexpected Genius

May 19, 2016

Ken Ono explains how Ramanujan has served as his “guardian angel” throughout his life and career.