The Quanta Podcast

Audio Edition: Amid Life’s Chaos, a Meticulous Mathematician Finds Stability

Before he won a Fields Medal for his pioneering work balancing randomness and order, Yu Deng had to achieve equilibrium in his own life. The article Amid Life’s Chaos, a

The Math of Democracy Never Quite Works Out

The French mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet was a passionate believer in democracy, but he also discovered a frustrating paradox within it: A majority can sometimes vot

Malaria Parasite Caught in the Act of Breaking and Entering

To invade red blood cells, malaria parasites create a temporary molecular portal that lets them slip into the cell — and then the door disappears behind it, gone in 60 se

Audio Edition: The Quietest Mathematician Has Always Been Worth Listening To

John Pardon sees connections between different areas of math that others don’t. For that vision, he’s now been awarded a Fields Medal. The article The Quietest Mathemati

'Ghostly' Galaxies and the Mystery of Dark Matter

In 2018, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi, astronomers discovered the first known dark matter-deficient galaxy, DF2. It’s about the same size as the Milky Way, but w

How Math Brings Together Classical Chaos, Quantum Mechanics, and Fractals

The uncertainty principle tells us that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it’s moving, and vice versa. In 2023, gr

Audio Edition: Sometimes Being First Means Seeing the End Before Anyone Else

Determination and effort propelled Jacob Tsimerman to the top of the math world. But now that he’s won a Fields Medal, he worries that the field is in jeopardy. The arti

Sea Monkeys, Jupiter, and the Mystery of Turbulence

Turbulence is all around us: bumping our planes, roiling our rivers, swirling milk into our coffee. These systems quickly become extremely chaotic and complex. On this ep

‘Jumping Genes’ Are More Than Parasitic DNA

You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild drama, thanks to a genetic materi

Audio Edition: For Hong Wang, Living Fully in the Math World Means Threading the Needle

Focus, commitment, and insight resulted in a “once in a century” proof. Hong Wang is now just the third woman to win a Fields Medal. The article Living Fully in the Math

Are the Little Red Dots Actually Black Hole Suns?

When all you can see is a speck, it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at. Astronomers first argued that little red dots spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022

Four-Color Theorem Is Still a Math Favorite

In 1852, the mathematician Francis Guthrie was coloring in a map of English counties when he noticed that he needed only four colors. Was this always true, he wondered? T

Audio Edition: ‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent. The article ‘Reverse M

Does Computer Science Need Computers?

In popular culture, computer science is practically synonymous with programming. There are obviously branches of computer science in which computer hardware and software

How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World

If you are well rested and full, your brain tells you that a bruised overripe apple is a piece of subpar fruit to be passed over. However, if you are exhausted and hungry

Audio Edition: A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life

The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing. The article A Cell So Minimal

Picking Teams With the Math of Imbalance

Combinatorial discrepancy theory is a branch of mathematics concerned with balance. If you’re making two teams — sports, trivia, you name it — how can you make sure that

What Makes a Fluid a Fluid?

The Navier-Stokes equations are enormously successful at predicting how fluids flow and swirl. But they fail to account for the microscopic bits that make up matter. But

Audio Edition: New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important role in both math and physics. The article New

Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons?

Reasoning comes in many technically defined forms, but the basic procedure is easily recognizable: arriving at a sound conclusion by linking together intermediate steps t