Pencils Down

David Richeson discusses the history and significance of the four color theorem.

Kalai discusses the meaning of cryptography and how essential it is to our daily lives.

Oppenheim describes why he thinks gravity can’t be squeezed into the same quantum box as the other fundamental forces — and what he’s proposing as an alternative.

Leonard Susskind and collaborators set out to understand why black hole interiors grow forever. They ended up proposing a new law of physics.

Renate Loll describes her theory of causal dynamical triangulations and how it might unlock certain aspects of quantum gravity.

DeepMind researchers trained an AI system called AlphaTensor to find new, faster algorithms for matrix multiplication. AlphaTensor quickly rediscovered — and surpassed, for some cases — the reigning algorithm discovered by German mathematician Volker Strassen in 1969.

Tracie Seimon of the WCS’s Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory describes her biodiversity research, which is based on eDNA — DNA collected from the environment.

Narayanan discusses his work on de-anonymization and fairness and why it
matters.

The phenomenon of criticality can explain the sudden emergence of new properties in a wide range of complex systems, from avalanches to flocks of birds to stock market crashes. Neuroscientists are now seeking evidence that criticality is at work in the brain’s networks of neurons.