Mathematics
The Mysterious Dance of the Cricket Embryos
In June, 100 fruit fly scientists gathered on the Greek island of Crete for their biennial meeting. Among them was Cassandra Extavour, a Canadian geneticist at Harvard University. Her lab works with fruit flies to study evolution and development — “evo devo.” Most often, such scientists choose as their “model organism” the species Drosophila melanogaster […]
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How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?
In the same spirit, he wondered what treasures might be submersed in Bitcoin’s data lake. “We literally have a record of every single transaction,” he said. “These are remarkable economic and sociological data sets. Clearly, there’s a lot of information in there, if you can get at it.” Getting at it proved nontrivial. Ms. Blackburn […]
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A Look at the Textbooks Rejected by the Florida Department of Education
After the Florida Department of Education rejected dozens of math textbooks last week, the big question was, Why? The department said some of the books “contained prohibited topics” from social-emotional learning or critical race theory — but it has released only four specific textbook pages showing content to which it objects. Using online sample materials […]
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Turing Award Won by Programmer Who Paved Way for Supercomputers
In the late 1970s, as a young researcher at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, Jack Dongarra helped write computer code called Linpack. Linpack offered a way to run complex mathematics on what we now call supercomputers. It became a vital tool for scientific labs as they stretched the boundaries of what a computer could do. […]
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Math That Helped Solve Fermat’s Theorem Now Safeguards the Digital World
Defenses against digital snoopers keep getting stronger. Encryption is what keeps communications safe when you use Signal and other messaging apps, make online financial transactions, buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and trust that private information in your Apple iPhone will stay private. While a variety of end-to-end encryption techniques seek to protect the flows […]
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