Category: Quantum Stuff

When were you first drawn to learning about it?  I don’t think that was from some deep-seated, lifelong need to study magnetism, but it grabbed me in grad school as an area of astrophysics that is not well understood and is avoided for its complexity. For astrophysics in general, I did a National Science Foundation… Continue reading Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy

One memorable encounter occurred while Ligocki was visiting Germany the summer after his sophomore year, when he took a side trip to Berlin to meet up with Marxen. “We got through the language barrier through the medium of busy beavers,” he said. The medium of beer also helped. Ligocki ended up having too many and… Continue reading Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine

In the tiling of wallpaper and bathroom floors, collective repeated patterns often emerge. Mathematicians have long tried to find a tiling shape that never repeats in this way. In 2023, they lauded an unexpected amateur victor. That discovery of the elusive aperiodic monotile propelled the field into new dimensions. The study of tessellation is much… Continue reading What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?

To some biologists, that approach leaves the protein folding problem incomplete. From the earliest days of structural biology, researchers hoped to learn the rules of how an amino acid string folds into a protein. With AlphaFold2, most biologists agree that the structure prediction problem is solved. However, the protein folding problem is not. “Right now,… Continue reading How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It

Mathematicians initially believed that it’s a circle. Then, in 1934, a German mathematician named Karl Reinhardt found something worse: an octagon with rounded edges. When those arcs in the corners are drawn using hyperbolas, the total coverage is about 90.24%. The difference between this and the circle’s 90.69% is tiny, but it’s mathematically vital. Reinhardt… Continue reading Why Is This Shape So Terrible to Pack?

The universe seems like it should be unfathomably complex. How then is science able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? Scientists and philosophers alike have often commented on the “unreasonable” success of mathematics at describing the universe. That success has helped science probe some profound mysteries — but as the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld… Continue reading How Is Science Even Possible?

The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of… Continue reading How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number