Mathematics

Mathematicians Clear Hurdle in Quest to Decode Primes

Quanta Magazine: It’s been 162 years since Bernhard Riemann posed a seminal question about the distribution of prime numbers. Despite their best efforts, mathematicians have made very little progress on the Riemann hypothesis. But they have managed to make headway on…

Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy

Quanta Magazine: A new proof has debunked a conspiracy that mathematicians feared might haunt the number line. In doing so, it has given them another set of tools for understanding arithmetic’s fundamental building blocks, the prime numbers. In a paper posted…

Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code

Quanta Magazine: Suppose you are trying to transmit a message. Convert each character into bits, and each bit into a signal. Then send it, over copper or fiber or air. Try as you might to be as careful as possible, what…

The Mathematician Who Delights in Building Bridges

Quanta Magazine: For her senior thesis at Princeton University, Ana Caraiani was given a challenging problem from her adviser, the mathematician Andrew Wiles. He’d recently garnered fame for his 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but Caraiani had less luck with…