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The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions
...known as divisive normalization, spells out the math behind this recalibration process. It proposes that neurons can send more efficient messages if they encode in their sequence of spikes only...
How to Use a Sphere to Talk to Mars
To avoid garbled messages, mathematicians might translate them into geometric form. It’s hard to send a message from Mars. When the Curiosity rover, currently active on the surface of the...
The New Familiar Quanta
...bring you the very best coverage of mathematics and basic science news. Over the years, thanks to you, our audience has multiplied. We have expanded into new forms of journalism...
Why Quantum Computers Might Not Break Cryptography
...is interesting to see that the conventional wisdom is wrong.” Math is hard. Indeed, much of the modern infrastructure for secure communication depends heavily on the difficulty of elementary mathematics...
Solution: ‘How to Win at Deep Learning’
...math. But real expertise requires more significant math and an intuitive talent that some call ‘a dark art.’” In our case, this very simple network can very easily solve the...
The Infinite Primes and Museum Guard Proofs, Explained
...the most beautiful and elegant proofs in mathematics. The collection was inspired by the legendary mathematician Paul Erdős, who envisioned an infinite book in which God had written the perfect...
An Innovator Who Brings Order to an Infinitude of Equations
...being selected as one of four winners of the Fields Medal, a prize conferred every four years by the International Mathematical Union on the most accomplished mathematicians in the world...
The (Imaginary) Numbers at the Edge of Reality
Odd enough to potentially model the strangeness of the physical world, complex numbers with “imaginary” components are rooted in the familiar. Have you ever sat in a math classroom and...
An Astrophysicist Who Maps the Universe’s Terra Incognita
...own path began with a map. Yes. I grew up in India. My parents are academics, so I grew up around books. I loved science and math. But I was...