Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and ...

Welcome to slot-machine Britain, where election day gives the people a chance to pull the lever on a one-armed bandit. Our bewildering range of outcomes emerges not so much from a belief that the ...

This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. Earlier this year, a slightly balding man in spectacles, a black T-shirt, and bright high-top ...

Music recommendation algorithms were supposed to help us cut through the noise, but they just served us up slop. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

Designed to accelerate advances in medicine and other fields, the tech giant’s quantum algorithm runs 13,000 times as fast as software written for a traditional supercomputer. A quantum computer at ...

Squaring — multiplying a number by itself — seems harmless, but repeat it long enough and it becomes a mathematical explosion. What begins as 2² quickly turns into 2⁴, 2⁸, 2¹⁶ — racing past the limits ...

A new report suggests that Dwayne Johnson is “heartbroken” over The Smashing Machine’s box office numbers. This report comes from insider Rob Shuter. On #ShuterScoop, Shuter said a source told him the ...

Dwayne Johnson’s latest film wasn’t exactly a “smash” hit. In fact, it was the lowest opening weekend of the blockbuster action star’s career. Johnson starred in “The Smashing Machine,” an arthouse ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...