Steve Nadis – Quanta Magazine

Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

Steve Nadis — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:17:37 +0000

Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life. At the time, Krapivin didn’t give it much thought. But two years later, when he finally set aside time to go through the paper (“just for fun,” as he put it), his efforts would lead to a rethinking of a widely used tool in computer science. The paper’s title…

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Cosmologists Try a New Way to Measure the Shape of the Universe

Steve Nadis — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 15:47:46 +0000

Is the universe infinite, Aristotle asked in 350 BCE, “or is this an impossibility? The decision … is … all-important to our search for the truth.” The Greek philosopher opined that “the heavens” (meaning the moon, planets, sun and other stars) travel around the Earth in circles, and that a “body which moves in a circle is not endless or infinite, but has its limit.” Moreover…

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New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection

Steve Nadis — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:42:25 +0000

Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who owns books and at least one shelf. The algorithm addresses something called the library sorting problem (more formally, the “list labeling” problem). The challenge is to devise a strategy for organizing books in some kind of sorted order — alphabetically…

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Novel Architecture Makes Neural Networks More Understandable

Steve Nadis — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:45:51 +0000

“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.” And yet, all this time, neural networks have had a disadvantage. The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer…

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Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes

Steve Nadis — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:31:25 +0000

To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the enigmatic extremes of the cosmos. Within them, matter is packed so tightly that, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity…

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