For decades, physicists have engaged in bitter back-and-forths over whether string theory is worth studying. The “string wars” aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
In the late 1830s, Karl Weierstrass dropped out of university. He is said to have spent his school years drinking and fencing. Decades later, he published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. www.quantamagazine.org/the-jagged-m...
David Dunning studied both English and math as an undergraduate. “They felt related to me,” he said. “They were both about the worlds and structures that can be summoned by writing.”
When math seems simple — like calculating a tip — that’s often only because notation has made it so. “We have these notational technologies that allow us to not see this as significant math, but it is,” said math historian David Dunning.
The artist Salvador Dalí, known for surrealist paintings such as his 1952 “Galatea of the Spheres,” experimented with boosting his creativity by waking himself during his brain’s transition into sleep. www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brai...
The computer program Lean might revolutionize mathematics. It has verified more than a quarter of a million theorems and led to new insights. But might it also erode conceptual and ideological diversity?
www.quantamagazine.org/in-math-rigo...
Most creatures use daylight to keep time. But a newly discovered jellyfish species has a mysterious biological clock that tracks periods of 20 hours, instead of 24. It suggests there may be more unconventional clocks across the tree of life.
Next time you sip wine at a party, notice the tears dripping down the inside walls of your glass. The same tensile force that causes wine tears also causes embryos to develop a head-to-tail axis. www.quantamagazine.org/genes-have-h...
Around the world, glass photographic plates from old telescopes are at risk. On them lies a largely unexplored history of our ever-changing cosmos. Tune in to The Quanta Podcast:
www.quantamagazine.org
David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology.
Off the coast of Japan, biologists netted a pea-size jellyfish with an unusual circadian clock — a chance finding that suggests there are likely more overlooked biological timekeeping mechanisms to…
