Fields Medal

Computer scientists have long used vector addition systems to model how certain programs work, but they didn’t have a full understanding of how complicated they could be. Recent work has finally pinned it down, showing that these problems are far more complicated than they seem.

Astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons.

Mathematicians working in the field of complex dynamical systems are patiently unraveling the Mandelbrot set’s mysteries and may be on the verge of solving a fundamental conjecture that would allow them to describe the set completely.

Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.

In 2023, mathematicians improved bounds on Ramsey numbers, a central measure of order in graphs; found a new aperiodic monotile; and discovered a new upper bound to the size of sets without 3-term arithmetic progressions.

In 2023, physicists found the gravitational wave background that’s made by supermassive black hole collisions, teleported quantum energy in the lab, and puzzled over JWST’s potentially cosmology-breaking discoveries.

In 2023, computer scientists made progress on a new vector-driven approach to AI, fundamentally improved Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers, and examined the surprising and powerful behaviors that can emerge from large language models.

During 2023, Quanta turned a spotlight on important research progress into the nature of consciousness, the origins of our microbiomes and the timekeeping mechanisms that govern our lives and development, among many other discoveries.

Is it possible to invent a computer that computes anything in a flash? Or could some problems stump even the most powerful of computers? Computational complexity theorists study these questions and others in the hopes of determining the limits of a computer’s powers.