Erica Klarreich – Quanta Magazine

Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time

Erica Klarreich — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:00:56 +0000

In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you have an urn filled with 100 balls, some red and some green. You can’t see inside; all you know is that someone determined the number of red balls by picking a number between zero and 100 from a hat.

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Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture

Erica Klarreich — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:02:17 +0000

A group of nine mathematicians has proved the geometric Langlands conjecture, a key component of one of the most sweeping paradigms in modern mathematics. The proof represents the culmination of three decades of effort, said Peter Scholze, a prominent mathematician at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics who was not involved in the proof. “It’s wonderful to see it resolved.

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Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem

Erica Klarreich — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:50:22 +0000

The change of plans came on a road trip. On a beautiful day last April, the mathematicians Rachel Greenfeld and Sarah Peluse set out from their home institution, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, heading to Rochester, New York, where both were scheduled to give talks the next day. They had been struggling for nearly two years with an important conjecture in harmonic...

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A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers

Erica Klarreich — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 15:02:05 +0000

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a method for finding prime numbers that continues to reverberate through mathematics today. His idea was to identify all the primes up to a given point by gradually “sieving out” the numbers that aren’t prime. His sieve starts by crossing out all the multiples of 2 (except 2 itself), then the multiples of 3 (except 3...

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Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile

Erica Klarreich — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 14:02:11 +0000

In mid-November of last year, David Smith, a retired print technician and an aficionado of jigsaw puzzles, fractals and road maps, was doing one of his favorite things: playing with shapes. Using a software package called the PolyForm Puzzle Solver, he had constructed a humble-looking hat-shaped tile. Now he was experimenting to see how much of the screen he could fill with copies of that tile...

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