ChatGPT has already wreaked havoc on classrooms and changed how teachers approach writing homework, since OpenAI publicly launched the generative AI chatbot in late 2022. School administrators rushed to try to detect AI-generated essays, and in turn, students scrambled to find out how to cloak their synthetic compositions. But by focusing on writing assignments, educators … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometimes mathematicians try to tackle a problem head on, and sometimes they come at it sideways. That’s especially true when the mathematical stakes are high, as with the Riemann hypothesis, whose solution comes with a $1 million reward from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Its proof … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In October, a Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The $5 billion mission is designed to find out if Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, can support life. But because Europa is constantly bombarded by intense … Read more
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them … Read more
Nine-year-old Lucas Mason Yao loves the Vancouver Canucks, his pet bunny Chomp and pi, the mathematical constant that’s celebrated every March 14 around the world. Yao, from Pitt Meadows, B.C., has memorized the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter to 2,030 digits, far beyond the 3.14 that’s close enough for most people. 4:41 … Read more
