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.

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 ...

“Imagine a computation that produces a new bit of information in every step, based on the bits that it has computed so far. Over t steps of time, it may generate up to t new bits of information in ...

Complexity theory is a fundamental branch of theoretical computer science that categorises computational problems according to their inherent difficulty and the resources required to solve them. At ...

When it comes to teaching math, a debate has persisted for decades: How, and to what degree, should algorithms be a focus of learning math? The step-by-step procedures are among the most debated ...