Graphs are everywhere. In discrete mathematics, they are structures that show the connections between points, much like a public transportation network. Mathematicians have long sought to develop ...

In 2019, Google claimed it was the first to demonstrate a quantum computer performing a calculation beyond the abilities of today's most powerful supercomputers. But most of the time, creating a ...

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

Part of “Complexity Theory,” a column on the tangled questions of our technological age. “Addressing algorithmic bias is like hygiene,” she told me. “You don’t brush once, you don’t floss once, you do ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

There is a fairly common pattern at our house these days. My wife, a liberal, will arrive home at work and offer a comment that starts with, “Can you believe that Trump did X today?” My response is ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...

YouTube is a supercomputer working to achieve a specific goal — to get you to spend as much time on YouTube as possible. But no one told its system exactly how to do that. After YouTube built the ...

For years, social media giants controlled what users saw in their feeds. While people could follow accounts, like posts or hide content they didn’t enjoy, recommendation algorithms controlled what was ...