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Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award
The prolific researcher found deep connections between randomness and computation and spent a career influencing cryptographers, complexity researchers and more.
Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound
Mathematicians have struggled to prove Falconer’s Conjecture, a simple, but far-reaching, hypothesis about the distances between points. They’re finally getting close.
How the Ancient Art of Eclipse Prediction Became an Exact Science
The timing of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024, will be known to within a second, thousands of years after fearful humans first started trying to anticipate these cosmic events.
Overexposure Distorted the Science of Mirror Neurons
After a decade out of the spotlight, the brain cells once alleged to explain empathy, autism and theory of mind are being refined and redefined.
Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement
Mathematicians are using topological abstractions to find places where it’s hard to vote.
Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness
The French mathematician spent decades developing a set of tools now widely used for taming random processes.
Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
Physicists Finally Find a Problem for Quantum Computers Alone
Researchers have shown that a problem relating to the energy of a quantum system is easy for quantum computers but hard for classical ones.
Fresh X-Rays Reveal a Universe as Clumpy as Cosmology Predicts
By mapping the largest structures in the universe in X-rays, cosmologists have found striking agreement with their standard theoretical model of how the universe evolves.