Max G. Levy

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

September 30, 2024

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

What Is Analog Computing?

August 2, 2024

You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.

Q&A

With ‘Digital Twins,’ The Doctor Will See You Now

July 26, 2024

By creating digital twins of patients, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

The Hidden Connection That Changed Number Theory

November 1, 2023

Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole field.

Two Students Unravel a Widely Believed Math Conjecture

August 10, 2023

Mathematicians thought they were on the cusp of proving a conjecture about the ancient structures known as Apollonian circles. But a summer project would lead to its downfall.

Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t

May 12, 2023

Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but they still struggle with the concept of negation. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

Machines Learn Better if We Teach Them the Basics

February 1, 2023

A wave of research improves reinforcement learning algorithms by pre-training them as if they were human.

Q&A

The AI Researcher Giving Her Field Its Bitter Medicine

August 30, 2022

Anima Anandkumar wants computer scientists to move beyond the matrix, among other challenges.

Machine Learning Gets a Quantum Speedup

February 4, 2022

Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together.

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