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How Network Math Can Help You Make Friends
Studying the structure of existing friendships in your community can help you forge the best connections when forming a new circle of friends.
‘Functional Fingerprint’ May Identify Brains Over a Lifetime
A unique neurological “functional fingerprint” allows scientists to explore the influence of genetics, environment and aging on brain connectivity.
Evolutionary Math and Just-So Stories
Evolutionary stories like the grandmother hypothesis are easy to construct from mathematical models, but how well do they reflect reality?
How Insulin Helped Create Ant Societies
Evolution may have coopted an ancient metabolic mechanism to set social insects on the path toward one of the most puzzling behaviors found in nature.
Universal Method to Sort Complex Information Found
The nearest neighbor problem asks where a new point fits into an existing data set. A few researchers set out to prove that there was no universal way to solve it. Instead, they found such a way.
Dark Energy May Be Incompatible With String Theory
A controversial new paper argues that universes with dark energy profiles like ours do not exist in the “landscape” of universes allowed by string theory.
Star-Swallowing Black Holes Reveal Secrets in Exotic Light Shows
Black holes occasionally reveal themselves when passing stars get ripped apart by their gravity. These tidal disruption events have created a new way for astronomers to map the hidden cosmos.
A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time
Akshay Venkatesh, a former prodigy who struggled with the genius stereotype, has won a Fields Medal for his “profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics.”
A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths
The theoretical computer scientist Constantinos Daskalakis has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for explicating core questions in game theory and machine learning.