On November 10, 2023, Kristín Jónsdóttir, head of the Icelandic Meteorological Office’s department of volcano research, was having a rare day off. “It was my 50th birthday,” she said. Then everything began to shake. She would spend the day staring at her phone, watching the earthquakes bloom across maps of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. The peninsula experiences fissure eruptions...
It’s the year 2718. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. The new technology can only make hyperjumps that follow the basic rules of arithmetic. Earth’s governing body has tapped you, an adventurous math explorer, to captain the first warp...
The post Hyperjumps Math Game first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for mathematics?” Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles...
We often talk about evolution in terms of competition, as the survival of the fittest. But if it is, then where did the widespread (and widely admired) impulse to help others even at great cost to ourselves come from? In this episode, Stephanie Preston, a professor of psychology and head of the Ecological Neuroscience Lab at the University of Michigan, talks about the evolutionary...
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