The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

Complexity theory is a branch of computer science that studies the resources required to solve computational problems, particularly focusing on the classification of problems based on their inherent ...

Everyone’s always talking about traveling through time, but if you ask me the ultimate temporal vacation would be just to pause the clock for a bit. Who among us couldn’t use a five or six month break ...

Primal methods constitute a common approach to solving (combinatorial) optimization problems. Starting from a given feasible solution, they successively produce new feasible solutions with ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...