Essays

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.

Modern scientists aren’t content with predicting how life evolves. They want to shape it.

The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years of work into tiles and their symmetries.

For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

Making sure our machines understand the intent behind our instructions is an important problem that requires understanding intelligence itself.

Albert Einstein’s ideas about space-time aren’t exactly intuitive, and they aren’t exactly Einstein’s, either.

Rethinking questions and chasing patterns led Newton to find the connection between curves and infinite sums.

The Langlands program provides a beautifully intricate set of connections between various areas of mathematics, pointing the way toward novel solutions for old problems.