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Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’
More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems. Has the powerful metaphor lost its mathematical meaning? Anne Salomon’s...
Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture
...Cheeger of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. “And how in God’s name could you construct a counterexample to it?” In this area of mathematics, said...
‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers
...mathematicians much deeper certainty about how prime numbers are distributed, while also implying a host of other consequences — making it arguably the most important open question in math. Mathematicians...
Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
...of the biggest questions in math and science today. In this episode, we’re going to be speaking to computer scientist Yejin Choi about the architecture and capabilities of large language...
Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture
In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians...
Can Thermodynamics Go Quantum?
...Why,” a podcast from Quanta Magazine where I take turns at the mic with my cohost, Janna Levin, exploring the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. In this...
Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time
...method, despite seeming like a mere mathematical convenience at the time, loosened the straitjacket of Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe as a sequence of falling dominos. Two centuries later,...
John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality
...mathematicians resort to a less stringent concept called concordance. Concordance involves situating your three-dimensional knot in four-dimensional space. When mathematicians add an extra dimension, new ways of contorting knots suddenly...
The Thought Experiments That Fray the Fabric of Space-Time
...how complicated they are. This winter, Ian Agol, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, posted a six-page paper that proved Gordon’s conjecture, giving mathematicians a new way to...