Page 102 - Simons Foundation News Today

z 3 = 3 might be obvious to any high school algebra student, where x, y, and z can be either 1, 1, and 1, or 4, 4, and -5. Finding a third solution, however, has stumped expert number theorists for decades, and in 1953 the puzzle prompted pioneering mathematician Louis Mordell to ask the question: Is it even possible to know whether other solutions for 3 exist? “This was sort of like Mordell throwing down the gauntlet,” says Sutherland. “The interest in solving this question is not so muc...

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the...

 E-Mail What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If youre mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel "The ...

 E-Mail Early Earth was no place to be. Hot, oxygen-free and subject to cataclysmic cosmic bombardments, our planet some 4.5 billion years ago was inhospitable to life as we know it. And yet from this early awkward stage, thanks to the metabolism of primitive single-celled organisms, Earths atmosphere changed. Oxygen levels rose first in the shallow surface waters and atmosphere, and 2 billion years later in deeper waters. This Great Oxidation Event, which began about 2.4 billion years ago, se...

Alyson Santoro and Susannah Porter receive support from the Moore and the Simons foundations to investigate the origins of the eukaryotic cell By Sonia...

 E-Mail IMAGE: A brightfield image of Pyramimonas parkeae (left) and a green fluorescence image of the same algae, revealing the ingested bacteria inside the cells (right). view more  Credit: N. Bock & E. Kim New research suggests that the ability of green algae to eat bacteria is likely much more widespread than previously thought, a finding that could be crucial to environmental and climate science. The work, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia Univ...

Courtesy of Alexander Kusenko and Chandrashekhar Khare From left: Alexander Kusenko and Chandrashekhar Khare Stuart Wolpert | February 16, 2021 Alexander Kusenko, professor of physics and astronomy, and Chandrashekhar Khare, professor of mathematics and the David Saxon Presidential Term Chair in Mathematics, have been awarded 2021 fellowships from the Simons Foundation. Kusenko, a fellow of American Physical Society, was awarded one of five fellowships in theoretical physics to suppor...

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, doctors and researchers rushed to find effective treatments. There was little time to spare. "Making new...

 E-Mail IMAGE: The research team collects samples during a 2015 cruise in the North Pacific. Co-author Bryndan Durham, center, recovers the sampling instrument. The gray bottles open and close at specific depths... view more  Credit: Dror Shitrit/Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology Just as plants and animals on land are keenly attuned to the hours of sunlight in the day, life in the oceans follows the rhythms of the day, the seasons and even the moon. A University of W...

In the lab of Irfan Siddiqi (left), ultracold freezers are key to investigating the theoretical and technological aspects of quantum coherence and harnessing the phenomenon in superconducting circuits and other devices. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser) To support research that has the potential to forge new paths in the physical sciences, UC Berkeley today (Jan. 28) launched the Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows program. Through a generous gift from the Heising-Simons...