profiles – Quanta Magazine

A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope

Joshua Sokol — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 15:12:26 +0000

One of the many times Lisa Kaltenegger’s dream jolted a little closer toward reality was on a cold April morning a decade ago at an astronomy conference. She was clutching what she recalls was a terrible, just awful cup of coffee, not because she was going to drink any more of it but because she had waited in line and it was warm in her hands. Then Bill Borucki veered in her direction.

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Physics Duo Finds Magic in Two Dimensions

Charlie Wood — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 15:45:49 +0000

Molybdenite, even to the trained eye, looks almost identical to graphite — a lustrous, silvery crystal. It acts similarly too, sloughing off flakes in a way that would make for a good pencil filling. But to an electron, the two grids of atoms form different worlds. The distinction first entered the scientific record 244 years ago. Carl Scheele, a Swedish chemist renowned for his discovery of...

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The Scientist Who Developed a New Way to Understand Communication

Stephen Ornes — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:15:46 +0000

By the time he was 17, Mark Braverman had lived in three countries and spoke as many languages. But though he doesn’t have a hometown, he’s quick to call theoretical computer science his home. “Theoretical computer science is whatever you want it to be,” he said in his airy office at Princeton University, sitting between a whiteboard bursting with mathematical equations and a wall decorated with...

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A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers

Erica Klarreich — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:21:31 +0000

In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers. It was an achievement that ordinarily would have garnered him fame even beyond the cloistered world of pure math research. There was just one...

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For His Sporting Approach to Math, a Fields Medal

Jordana Cepelewicz — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:20:13 +0000

The math department at the University of Geneva is usually quiet and still — that is, except when voices boom down the hall from the office of Hugo Duminil-Copin, a not infrequent occurrence. “We were known within the department for shouting at each other all the time, because we would get very excited about what we were doing,” said Ioan Manolescu, a mathematician at the University of Fribourg...

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