Quanta Magazine

Mathematically speaking, democracy is next to impossible.

In medieval Italy, it was accepted wisdom that anyone walking near a swamp risked falling ill from “bad air” — mala aria.

On a frigid February morning in Edinburgh, Scotland, Patrick Hickey had run out of living things to put under his microscope.

Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out.

Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word.

People may think of soil as just dirt, but it is anything but inert.

About 65 million light-years from Earth, three galaxies don’t look quite right.

Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT — “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk — it all starts, in some sense, with an intern in a University of…

On the morning of September 11, 2026, Dor Minzer received a text message from a friend asking whether he was close to settling one of the most famous open questions in theoretical computer science.

Throughout the summer of 2026, there were plenty of signs of what was to come.

In the 1960s and ’70s, colorful comic book advertisements from the Transcience Corporation in New York City promised to mail anyone who sent cash, check, or money order a “bowlfull of happiness” — in reality, a small paper envelope of freeze-dried eggs.

We know all about how things exist in the three dimensions of length, width, and height.

I get out of bed.

The late Ronald Graham wore two hats.

In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable string of characters: AdS/CFT.

Two decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way.

You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history.

In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich.

Quantum mechanics may be one of the most precisely tested paradigms in science, but there’s still no universally accepted interpretation of what it tells us about reality.

Around 700 million years ago, a group of organisms resembling little more than glowing, gelatinous blobs split off from the rest of the animals, forming possibly the earliest branching animal lineage.

Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang, a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered into the chains of galaxies we see today.

For thousands and sometimes millions of years, marine plankton all over the world built their spiral shells in one direction.

Some math problems continue to haunt researchers long after they’ve been solved.

The mathematical universe is boundless and heterogeneous, encompassing, over here, truths about numbers and equations; there, the logic of shapes and spaces; and over there, the study of change and probability.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 8, mathematicians at OpenAI announced that a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents under their direction, running on an advanced model not available to the public, had found a “singularity” in the Navier-Stokes equations