Gothenburg promised to optimise school admissions with a piece of code. The resulting chaos showed how unaccountable systems are ruining lives We like to imagine that injustice announces itself loudly ...

College students spend anywhere from 12 to 18 hours per week in a lecture hall. Their eyes wander across their computer. They sort their to-do list, complete the Wordle and text their friends. In the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems ...

While the creation of this new entity marks a big step toward avoiding a U.S. ban, as well as easing trade and tech-related tensions between Washington and Beijing, there is still uncertainty ...

As the world races to build artificial superintelligence, one maverick bioengineer is testing how much unprogrammed intelligence may already be lurking in our simplest algorithms to determine whether ...

Lectures on Tap series brings professors and other experts into Boston restaurants and bars for talks that mix big ideas with food and drink. Lectures on Tap, an event series, brings ticketed lectures ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the ...

An exclusive excerpt from Every Screen On The Planet reveals how the social media app’s powerful recommendation engine was shaped by a bunch of ordinary, twentysomething curators—including a guy named ...

On a windy Thursday night in downtown Boston, the hanging portraits of Bostonians past seemed to watch over the bustling crowd in Democracy Brewing‘s backroom. Sixty young professionals claimed seats ...

How do the algorithms that populate our social media feeds actually work? In a piece for Time Magazine excerpted from his recent book Robin Hood Math, Noah Giansiracusa sheds light on the algorithms ...

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If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.