News, Views & Insights
The Erdős unit distance problem asks for the largest possible number u(n) of unit distances among n points in the plane. This is equivalent to finding maximally dense unit-distance graphs. A recent OpenAI announcement concerns the asymptotic problem: the old n^(1+o(1)) expectation is false.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” said the mathematician Andrew Granville, reflecting on the rapid improvement of AI systems. His phrase captures the mood of the moment: by 2025-26, large language models (LLMs) had become powerful enough to move from impressive demonstrations to serious mathematical and scientific use. AI systems reached gold-medal level at the […]
A single two-input gate suffices for all of Boolean logic in digital hardware. No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt and log has always required multiple distinct operations. Here I show that a single binary operator, eml(x,y)=exp(x)-ln(y), together with the constant 1, generates the standard […]
In the next few days, most people in the United States, Canada, Cuba, Haiti and some parts of Mexico will be transitioning from “standard” (or winter) time to “daylight” (or summer) time. This semiannual tradition has been the source of desynchronized alarm clocks, missed appointments and headaches for parents trying to get kids to bed at the right time since 1908, but why exactly do we fiddle with the clocks two times a year?