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 ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Theoretical computer scientists are always probing the relationship of space (memory) and time. For 50 years, experts knew that a calculation of X steps required X/log X memory slots, but a new study ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She ...

Imagine a swarm of fireflies, flickering lights on and off in the nighttime space. How does the human brain process and integrate information about duration and spatial position enabling this vision?