This edition highlights reading about messages in bottles, public benches, infinity, a series of books about everything, and pay-to-play orchestras.
Quanta Magazine
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
“Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: subsea storytelling, a preservation paradox, achieving serpentine symbiosis, an investigation into infinity, and a marijuana mystery.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Man Who Stole Infinity
“In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.”
Posted inReading List
Seeing is Believing: A Reading List on Making Meaning from Data
Eight stories on the power and beauty of visual communication.
Posted inEditor's Pick
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery
“After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA
“By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s ‘ChatGPT for genomes’ could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.”