Magnus Carlsen is often viewed as a "chess god," a machine-like entity who grinds down world-class Grandmasters until they crumble. But beneath the 2882 peak Elo rating lies a human being who has ...

Thousands of computers across the world are currently scouring the number line in a scavenger hunt for rare mathematical gems. Enthusiasts looking for larger and larger prime numbers, which are ...

Mathematicians love a good puzzle. Even something as abstract as multiplying matrices (two-dimensional tables of numbers) can feel like a game when you try to find the most efficient way to do it.

What do the digits of pi, colliding blocks and quantum search algorithms have in common? More than you might expect. Two playful papers, one from 2003 and one from last month, provide the links ...

In September 16, 2011, an anime fan posted a math question to the online bulletin board 4chan about the cult classic television series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Season one of the show, which ...

BIG THINGS HAPPEN when computers get smaller. Or faster. And quantum computing is about chasing perhaps the biggest performance boost in the history of technology. The basic idea is to smash some ...

A quantum computer is a device that could exploit the weirdness of the quantum world to solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them using a conventional computer. Alas, ...