Scientists Found ‘Magic’ Particles in the Large Hadron Collider
In November, Quanta magazine published a feature on the detection of “magic” top quarks at CERN’s Large Hadron…
A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science
Computer scientists want to know how many steps a given algorithm requires. For example, any local algorithm that…
Behold the Manifold, the Concept that Changed How Mathematicians View Space
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we…
Research Reveals the Optimal Way to Optimize
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics…
For the First Time, AI Analyzes Language as Well as a Human Expert
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which…
This AI Model Can Intuit How the Physical World Works
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Here’s a test for infants: Show them a…
The Oceans Are Going to Rise—but When?
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In May 2014, NASA announced at a press…
Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers…
Physicists Create a Thermometer for Measuring ‘Quantumness’
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems…
The ‘10 Martini’ Proof Connects Quantum Mechanics With Infinitely Intricate Mathematical Structures
But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that…
Distillation Can Make AI Models Smaller and Cheaper
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot…
The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program
But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this…