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For Persi Diaconis’ Next Magic Trick …
...smooshing will confer only inconsequentially tiny increments of additional randomness. The cutoff phenomenon, which occurs in a variety of situations in math and physics, owes its discovery to an earlier...
In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge
...on a computer, their suspicions were confirmed: The interaction between drivers caused the spacing between departures to exhibit a distinctive pattern previously observed in quantum physics experiments. “I was thinking...
Mathematicians Shed Light on Minimalist Conjecture
...in the Bulletin. The substantial proportion of computed elliptic curves with rank higher than 1 is somewhat analogous to dark matter in physics, they added. “This large mass of rational...
A Proof That Some Spaces Can’t Be Cut
...dissertation adviser at Harvard, and Tomasz Mrowka, a topologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, combined equations that originated in quantum physics with Floer homology to construct a powerful invariant...
New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start
...of life’s handedness in the prebiotic worlds of physics and chemistry, not biology. Many molecules come in mirror-image forms, known as left-handed and right-handed. A chemical process will create both...
A New Tool to Help Mathematicians Pack
...in 8-D and a Leech lattice in 24-D. These arrangements are not only densest; they are “universally” optimal. Perhaps for this reason, the structures appear broadly throughout mathematics and physics....
Debating the Evolution of Multicellularity
...and the Evolution of Multicellularity,” at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The daily talk sessions were attended by scores of highly regarded...
How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
...physics,” Dunne said. Despite its triumph in physics, the path integral makes mathematicians queasy. Even a simple particle moving through space has infinitely many possible paths. Fields are worse, with...
One Lab’s Quest to Build Space-Time Out of Quantum Particles
...particle physics or cosmology — a state of affairs that could continue indefinitely — this could be the most promising route for putting the latest ideas about quantum gravity to...