From planning transportation networks to organizing massive datasets, many of society's most important challenges boil down to an optimization problem: finding the best solution among an enormous ...

As a genre, the “award acceptance lecture” is little more than a formality and a banality. But there is at least one charming exception to this rule—the talks given by the foremost computer scientists ...

Long-distance driving in a Porsche Turbo S brings performance, comfort, and endurance into focus as the road trip develops problems along the way. Rather than a track setting or short test drive, the ...

The Florida Department of Health has issued a "do not consume python" advisory due to unhealthy mercury levels. Despite the advisory, it is not illegal to eat python meat in Florida. Some chefs and ...

While Burmese pythons are not venomous, their bites are common and feel like needles tearing through the skin. Invasive pythons have severely impacted Florida's small mammal populations in the ...

Federal energy regulators announced Thursday that they plan to curtail cumulative environmental reviews of new energy projects, in response to a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year. Laura Swett, ...

Place any number of dots on a two-dimensional plane—say, a piece of paper—and measure the distance between each pair. If you rearrange the dots, how many pairs could be positioned exactly the same ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary ...

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For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have struggled to solve a classic geometry puzzle first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946: the planar unit distance problem. The question posed by the legendary Hungarian ...