Algorithms are all around us, governing everything from the recipes we use to cook dinner to the routes our navigational systems suggest we take to avoid traffic. But what exactly is an algorithm? In ...

Studies of diversity in academic publishing arrive regularly in the scientific literature. But where do the data come from? Publications don’t usually include demographic data such as the gender, race ...

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 ...

What do encrypted messages, recognizing speech commands and running simulations to predict the weather have in common? They all rely on matrix multiplication for accurate calculations. DeepMind, an ...

For humans, identifying items in a scene — whether that’s an avocado or an Aventador, a pile of mashed potatoes or an alien mothership — is as simple as looking at them. But for artificial ...

From deciding visa eligibility to detecting financial fraud, predicting reoffending rates to allocating police resources, algorithmic systems increasingly assist government in making important ...