“It’s a great algorithm,” said Erik Demaine, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s very fast, simple, and easy to implement.” To put this procedure into practice, …
Figuring out what subgroups a group contains is one way to understand its structure. For example, the subgroups of Z6 are {0}, {0, 2, 4} and {0, 3}—the trivial subgroup, …
ChatGPT has already wreaked havoc on classrooms and changed how teachers approach writing homework, since OpenAI publicly launched the generative AI chatbot in late 2022. School administrators rushed to try …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when …
Both kids and adults explored a new educational play space near downtown San Jose on Friday, turning the wheel to open up a giant solar sunflower or crawling through a …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. …
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key …
Nine-year-old Lucas Mason Yao loves the Vancouver Canucks, his pet bunny Chomp and pi, the mathematical constant that’s celebrated every March 14 around the world. Yao, from Pitt Meadows, B.C., …
Ducati, maker of high-performance engines with fancy valvetrains, has a new high-performance engine with a fancy valvetrain. The unique feature with this one is that it’s a mere single cylinder, …
Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like …