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I've supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. Today, I'm proud to announce that Adam Yedidia, a PhD student at MIT (but an MEng student when he did most of this work),…
Most people believe 18446744073709551615, or 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal, to be the largest number representable in 64 bits. Which is indeed the case if we are talking about 64 bit unsigned...
As Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the uncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance
Cantor's Paradise Share This is a free preview of a premium issue of the Cantor’s Paradise newsletter. If you enjoy it, I hope you will consider supporting future such issues by signing up for a paid subscription. Thank you! Left: Wiener with Max Born in Göttingen in 1925 (Photo: George H. Davis, Jr. Courtesy MIT Museum). Mathematician and later father of cybernetics Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) crossed paths with many great minds in his life, from Bertrand Russell and G.H. Hardy, to Max Born, John F. Nash Jr. and John von Neumann. von Neumann’s assistant Edgar R. Lorch’s recollecti...
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Programmers normally want to minimize the time their code takes to execute. But in 1962, the Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó posed the opposite problem. He asked: How long can a simple computer program possibly run before it terminates? Radó nicknamed these maximally inefficient but still functional programs “busy beavers.” Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathe...