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Quanta Magazine

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Quanta Magazine

@QuantaMagazine

Illuminating math and science. Supported by @SimonsFdn. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting.

Joined October 2012

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Quanta Magazine
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Jun 18
The human genome is no blueprint or algorithm — it’s something else entirely, something living with promiscuous logic. Can new genomic AI models, such as Evo 2 and AlphaGenome, untangle these tricky knots or will the genome confound them, too?
Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta Magazine
From quantamagazine.org
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Oct 25, 2021
“Real numbers can’t exist, because you can’t hide them inside black holes.” — Ahmed Almheiri, physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study.
quantamagazine.org
Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math.
The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers.
Quanta Magazine
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Dec 12, 2020
Did the universe emerge from an initial point known as a “singularity? Or, as Stephen Hawking argued, does it have no temporal beginning at all? A critique of Hawking’s “no-boundary” proposal has reignited the debate.
quantamagazine.org
Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning | Quanta Magazine
A recent challenge to Stephen Hawking’s biggest idea — about how the universe might have come from nothing — has cosmologists choosing sides.
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Aug 1, 2025
Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. @KSHartnett reports:
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
From quantamagazine.org
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Feb 12, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope will see what — and when — its predecessors cannot see. quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-jame…
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Oct 26, 2024
In 1956, 26-year-old Edgar Dijkstra invented a classic path-finding algorithm while out with his fiancée at a café in Amsterdam. It all happened in his head: “Without pencil and paper you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities,” he said. quantamagazine.org/computer-scien…
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Feb 8, 2022
For the first time, mathematicians have shown the most efficient way yet of squaring the circle — or, equivalently, of circling the square — by cutting the shapes into pieces simple enough to be visualized and then rearranging them. quantamagazine.org/an-ancient-geo…
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May 6, 2023
At 23 years old, Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper that helped define computation, algorithms and what came to be known as Turing machines — the theoretical foundation for modern computing. quantamagazine.org/alan-turings-m…
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Mar 14, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope will see what — and when — its predecessors cannot see. quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-jame…
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Oct 27, 2024
Dijkstra’s algorithm doesn’t just tell you the fastest route to one destination. Instead, it gives you an ordered list of travel times from your current location to every other point that you might want to visit — a solution to what researchers call the single-source
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Jul 12, 2023
The married mathematicians Eric Larson and Isabel Vogt often found themselves discussing ideas after dinner, working through problems on the chalkboards they have in their home. The pair recently proved a centuries-old question about algebraic curves. quantamagazine.org/old-problem-ab…
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Mar 9, 2024
Mathematicians are studying elliptic curve patterns that resemble murmurations of starlings. Nina Zubrilina, a doctoral student at Princeton, was the first to prove a formula that explains reasons for the patterns. quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curve…
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Aug 1, 2022
Growing evidence supports what physicists have long suspected: In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper.
quantamagazine.org
The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End
In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information.
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Jul 2, 2022
Before mathematicians used modern symbolic algebra, they would reason geometrically. For instance, these figures show the equation (𝑎 + 𝑏)² = 𝑎² + 2𝑎𝑏 + 𝑏². quantamagazine.org/the-scandalous…