random walk – Quanta Magazine

Statistics Postdoc Tames Decades-Old Geometry Problem

Erica Klarreich — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:26:22 +0000

In the mid-1980s, the mathematician Jean Bourgain thought up a simple question about high-dimensional shapes. And then he remained stuck on it for the rest of his life. Bourgain, who died in 2018, was one of the preeminent mathematicians of the modern era. A winner of the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, he was known as a problem-solver extraordinaire — the kind of person you might talk...

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Random Search Wired Into Animals May Help Them Hunt

Liam Drew — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 13:45:46 +0000

It’s not surprising that the fruit fly larva in the laboratory of Jimena Berni crawls across its large plate of agar in search of food. “A Drosophila larva is either eating or not eating, and if it’s not eating, it wants to eat,” she said. The surprise is that this larva can search for food at all. Owing to a suite of genetic tricks performed by Berni, it has no functional brain. In fact...

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The Map of Mathematics

Kevin Hartnett — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 17:30:36 +0000

Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.

The post The Map of Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

How Randomness Can Make Math Easier

Kevin Hartnett — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:00:34 +0000

Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little benefit. Math traffics in logic and rigor. Its broad goals are to find order and structure in a vast sea of objects. It’s precisely because the mathematical world isn’t random that the whole enterprise of mathematics is possible. Yet the recent Quanta article “Random Surfaces Hide an Intricate Order” concerned a...

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Random Surfaces Hide an Intricate Order

Kevin Hartnett — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 15:00:08 +0000

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones must find a secret chamber that contains the legendary Ark of the Covenant. To identify its exact location, Indy must uncover a special map that’s only visible when the sun shines through a special crystal in a certain room at a certain time of day. This idea — that essential information can be revealed when circumstances are just right — occurs in many...

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