Alessio Figalli studies optimal transport, a field of math that ranges from the movements of clouds to the workings of chatbots. By Siobhan Roberts The words “optimal” and “optimize” derive from the ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Earlier this year, Maryna Viazovska showed ...