Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to ...

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles ...

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster ...

A new proof reveals the answer to the decades-old “moving sofa” problem. It highlights how even the simplest optimization problems can have counterintuitive answers. If you’ve ever moved into a new ...

Richard Green is a freelance mathematics writer and a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has a degree from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the University ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Can AI Models Show Us How ...

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle. Particle ...

Maintenance of the software that’s used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree. The situation reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia. Matt von ...

The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. A new proof marks the ...