Pencils Down

Rutgers University mathematician Alex Kontorovich takes us on a journey through the continents of mathematics to learn about the awe-inspiring symmetries at the heart of the Langlands program.

Astrophysicists and data scientists on the Event Horizon Telescope team give the backstory behind their new image of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole.

Leslie Lamport talks about the importance of programming instead of coding, how he developed distributed systems and his favorite algorithm.

Vijay Balasubramanian discusses the connections he sees between physics, computer science, neuroscience and literature and the humanities.

Steven Strogatz — the acclaimed mathematician and author — hosts the new Quanta Magazine podcast “The Joy of Why.” On March 18, 2022, he joined Quanta editor Thomas Lin for a Simons Foundation Presents conversation about teaching, writing and podcasting.

For years, a pair of scientists have studied how a simple multicellular animal called Trichoplax coordinates its complex behavior without neurons or muscles. Their work shows that mechanical interactions alone can explain how the organism moves, seeks food and reproduces.

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, enjoys studying the math underlying everyday phenomena. “Mathematics is part of the creative world,” Ellenberg says. “We create things all the time.”

Celia Escamilla-Rivera discusses how she is using the tools of precision cosmology to hunt for a theory of gravity that incorporates dark energy more naturally than general relativity does.

It was a big year. Researchers found a way to idealize deep neural networks using kernel machines—an important step toward opening these black boxes. There were major developments toward an answer about the nature of infinity. And a mathematician finally managed to model quantum gravity.