Erica Klarreich
Journalist at Freelance
Mathematics and science journalist. My work has appeared in Quanta, Nature, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Science News and other publications.
Articles
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1 week ago |
quantamagazine.org | Erica Klarreich
It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move around in. It doesn’t change the defining features of space: its endlessness and its uniformity. But different dimensions have decidedly different personalities. In dimensions 8 and 24, it’s possible to pack balls together especially tightly.
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1 week ago |
flipboard.com | Erica Klarreich
2 hours agoIf the Trump administration wants more babies, it needs to embrace a different kind of parent. American households don’t look like they used to. They’ve been changing for decades, in part because fewer people have been having kids—but also because different people have been having kids. More …
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Feb 3, 2025 |
quantamagazine.org | Solomon Adams |Gregory Barber |Erica Klarreich
Introduction The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the eminent mathematician David Hilbert announced a list of 23 key problems to guide the next century of mathematical research. His problems not only provided a road map for the field but reflected a more ambitious vision — to build a firm foundation from which all mathematical truths could be derived.
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Jan 23, 2025 |
quantamagazine.org | Solomon Adams |Gregory Barber |Erica Klarreich |Jordana Cepelewicz
Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky foundation. Its core concepts were rooted in intuition and informal arguments, rather than precise, formal definitions. Two schools of thought emerged in response, according to Michael Barany, a historian of math and science at the University of Edinburgh. French mathematicians were by and large content to keep going.
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Jan 15, 2025 |
quantamagazine.org | Gregory Barber |Erica Klarreich |Jordana Cepelewicz
Introduction In May of 1694, in a lecture hall at the University of Cambridge, Isaac Newton and the astronomer David Gregory started to contemplate the nature of the stars, only to end up with a math puzzle that would persist for centuries. The details of their conversation were poorly recorded and are possibly apocryphal — it had something to do with how stars of varying sizes would orbit a central sun.
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"A proof that Riemann missed" -- my latest for @QuantaMagazine addresses an age-old question: which numbers are irrational? https://t.co/EDw1ufcKgG
Hector Pasten didn't want to write an exam for his students, so he procrastinated by thinking about a nearly century-old problem about prime factors--and solved it! My latest for @QuantaMagazine https://t.co/iTcfkX1xtY
RT @JimPropp: “Our Fractional Universe” offers a peek into a parallel world in which mathematicians make discoveries in a radically differe…
