The proof, known to be so hard that a mathematician once offered 10 martinis to whoever could figure it out, connects quantum ...

A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive ...

The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that ...

The quest to find the longest-running simple computer program has identified a new champion. It’s physically impossible to write out the numbers involved using standard mathematical notation.

Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist and author. He has contributed to Scientific American, the BBC and Nautilus, among others. His latest book is The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose ...

New studies of the ‘platypus of materials’ help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He has blogged about math for The New York Times and The New Yorker and has been a frequent guest on ...

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of ...