Ben Brubaker

In Shang-Hua Teng’s work, theoretical and practical questions have long been intertwined. Now he’s turning his focus to the impractical.

Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.

Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

Inspired by the results of a game-playing neural network, mathematicians have been making unexpected advances on an age-old math problem.

A custom-built machine learning algorithm can predict when a complex system is about to switch to a wildly different mode of behavior.

Physicists have solved a key problem of robotic locomotion by revising the usual rules of interaction between simple component parts.

Throwing out data seems to make measurements of distances and angles more precise. The reason why has been traced to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing.

The same phenomenon by which an opera singer can shatter a wineglass also underlies the very existence of subatomic particles.