Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights ...

Shalma Wegsman is the spring 2025 writing fellow at Quanta Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in physics from New York University and is a co-host of the podcast Why This Universe?

By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of ...

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating ...

Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities.

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever ...

Is the universe infinite, Aristotle asked in 350 BCE, “or is this an impossibility? The decision … is … all-important to our search for the truth.” The Greek ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Computer scientists often ...

In the late 19th century, Karl Weierstrass invented a fractal-like function that was decried as nothing less than a “deplorable evil.” In time, it would transform the foundations of mathematics.

It’s the championship game of the Imaginary Math League, where the Atlanta Algebras will face the Carolina Cross Products. The two teams haven’t played each other this season, but earlier in the year ...