Google has acquired small visual search-related startup Undecidable Labs for an undisclosed amount, putting the firm's founder Cathy Edwards (a former engineering director at Apple) in charge of its ...

In this paper we study generic complexity of undecidable problems. It turns out that some classical undecidable problems are, in fact, strongly undecidable, i.e., they are undecidable on every ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed. In 1900, the ...

The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future ...

A logical paradox at the heart of mathematics and computer science turns out to have implications for the real world, making a basic question about matter fundamentally unanswerable. In 1931, Austrian ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...