multimedia – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 Quanta Relaunches Hyperjumps Math Game https://www.quantamagazine.org/quanta-relaunches-hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/quanta-relaunches-hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/#respond Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:22:22 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=134922 The post Quanta Relaunches Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. The new technology can only make hyperjumps that follow the basic rules of arithmetic. Earth’s governing body has tapped you, an adventurous math explorer, to captain the first warp...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/quanta-relaunches-hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/feed/ 0 Hyperjumps Math Game https://www.quantamagazine.org/hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/#respond Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:21:16 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=134981 The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/hyperjumps-math-game-20240216/feed/ 0 The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quest-to-decode-the-mandelbrot-set-maths-famed-fractal-20240126/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quest-to-decode-the-mandelbrot-set-maths-famed-fractal-20240126/#respond Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:46:49 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=134276 The post The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> In the mid-1980s, like Walkman cassette players and tie-dyed shirts, the buglike silhouette of the Mandelbrot set was everywhere. Students plastered it to dorm room walls around the world. Mathematicians received hundreds of letters, eager requests for printouts of the set. (In response, some of them produced catalogs, complete with price lists; others compiled its most striking features into...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quest-to-decode-the-mandelbrot-set-maths-famed-fractal-20240126/feed/ 0 Behold Modular Forms, the ‘Fifth Fundamental Operation’ of Math https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/#respond Thu, 21 Sep 2023 06:44:56 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=130315 The post Behold Modular Forms, the ‘Fifth Fundamental Operation’ of Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> “There are five fundamental operations in mathematics,” the German mathematician Martin Eichler supposedly said. “Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modular forms.” Part of the joke, of course, is that one of those is not like the others. Modular forms are much more complicated and enigmatic functions, and students don’t typically encounter them until graduate school. But “there...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modular-forms-the-fifth-fundamental-operation-of-math-20230921/feed/ 0 Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-complicated-thing-imaginable-20221019/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-proton-the-most-complicated-thing-imaginable-20221019/#respond Wed, 19 Oct 2022 14:21:02 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=119773 The post Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton. High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons that buzz around them. College students learn that...

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