statistics – Quanta Magazine

Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness

Jordana Cepelewicz — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:00:17 +0000

Random processes take place all around us. It rains one day but not the next; stocks and bonds gain and lose value; traffic jams coalesce and disappear. Because they’re governed by numerous factors that interact with one another in complicated ways, it’s impossible to predict the exact behavior of such systems. Instead, we think about them in terms of probabilities...

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Elliptic Curve ‘Murmurations’ Found With AI Take Flight

Lyndie Chiou — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 15:12:30 +0000

Elliptic curves are among the more beguiling objects in modern mathematics. They don’t seem complicated, but they form an expressway between the math that many people learn in high school and research mathematics at its most abstruse. They were central to Andrew Wiles’ celebrated proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the 1990s. They are key tools in modern cryptography. And in 2000...

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Evolution: Fast or Slow? Lizards Help Resolve a Paradox.

Carrie Arnold — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:30:50 +0000

James Stroud had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation.

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Chasing the Elusive Numbers That Define Epidemics

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 16:25:27 +0000

Variables in epidemiological models aren’t usually well known to the general public, but one has had a genuine movie star moment. “What we need to determine is this,” says a scientist played by Kate Winslet in the film Contagion. “For every person who gets sick, how many other people are they likely to infect?” On a whiteboard, she writes down the answer for several familiar diseases: around 1 for...

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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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