Richard Green is a freelance mathematics writer and a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has a degree from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University ...

A new proof reveals the answer to the decades-old “moving sofa” problem. It highlights how even the simplest optimization problems can have counterintuitive answers.

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles ...

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster ...

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. Certain grammatical rules ...

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?

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

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

Under the sea ice during the Arctic’s pitch-black polar night, cells power photosynthesis on the lowest light levels ever observed in nature. Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more ...