Studying the epic journey of the iconic jumping plumber can lead to new insights in theoretical computer science—and may help ...

Two brothers in Singapore have built a data-encryption company on pure mathematics, betting that a problem no algorithm can ...

Abstract: We resolve three long-standing open problems, namely the (algorithmic) decidability of network coding, the decidability of conditional information inequalities, and the decidability of ...

Kurt Gödel, the man who ruined mathematics, was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He was born in 1906, smack-bang in the middle of the greatest crisis that maths has ever known.

Program comprehension is a critical skill in computer science, enabling programmers to understand, analyze, and modify existing software systems. Although this skill is fundamental for both novice and ...

For decades, philosophers, technologists, and even billionaires like Elon Musk have toyed with the idea that our universe might be a highly sophisticated computer simulation. The idea represents one ...

As a child of the 1990s, I couldn’t avoid the game-turned-best-seller Tetris. Launched in 1984 by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris quickly became a blockbuster and has had hundreds of ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the ...

The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future ...