Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue

“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert said. In fact, it matched so closely that Carenza’s first response was that it must be wrong. The team jokingly worried that a peer reviewer might think they’d cheated. “It really was that beautiful,” Carenza said. The observations answer a “long-standing … Read more

Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking

Turing’s diagonalization proof is a version of this game where the questions run through the infinite list of possible algorithms, repeatedly asking, “Can this algorithm solve the problem we’d like to prove uncomputable?” “It’s sort of ‘infinity questions,’” Williams said. To win the game, Turing needed to craft a problem where the answer is no … Read more

A New Proof Strikes the Needle on a Sticky Geometry Downside

The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first appeared like nothing greater than a enjoyable train in geometry. Lay an infinitely skinny, inch-long needle on a flat floor, then rotate it in order that it factors in each path in flip. What’s … Read more

The Lawlessness of Giant Numbers

The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal. Up to now this 12 months, Quanta has chronicled three main advances in Ramsey idea, the examine of learn how to keep away from creating mathematical patterns. The primary consequence put a brand new cap on how huge a set of integers might be with … Read more

A Laptop-Assisted Proof Solves the ‘Packing Coloring’ Downside

Heule, nonetheless, discovered the invention of previous outcomes invigorating. It demonstrated that different researchers discovered the issue essential sufficient to work on, and confirmed for him that the one end result value acquiring was to unravel the issue fully. “As soon as we figured on the market had been 20 years of labor on the … Read more

Mathematicians Discover Hidden Construction in a Frequent Kind of Area

Within the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise, joined a graduate studying group that got down to research a single paper over a semester. However by the semester’s finish, Sawhney recollects, they determined to maneuver on, flummoxed by the proof’s complexity. “It was actually superb,” he stated. … Read more