In addition to writing his popular book Love and Math, Edward Frenkel has contributed numerous articles to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Scientific American, and other publications.
A selection of his recent articles may be found above and below.
We are well aware by now of the observer problem in quantum mechanics. Human subjectivity appears to play a key role in the results of quantum experiments. However, the observer problem reaches far beyond just quantum mechanics.
A chapter from a new academic volume on Artificial Intelligence
If a company treats people as pieces in a board game, why would it care about privacy and ethics?
A tribute to Alexander Grothendieck published in The New York Times. “A party of one, he was unafraid to be himself and to speak his truth. He taught us that life is more valuable than any equation.”
We live in a new era in which mathematics has become a powerful weapon. It can be used for good—we all benefit from technological advances based on math—but also for ill. When the nuclear bomb was built, theoretical physicists who had…
Imagine a world in which it is possible for an elite group of hackers to install a “backdoor” not on a personal computer but on the entire U.S. economy. Imagine that they can use it to cryptically raise taxes and slash…
When I meet someone and tell them that I am a mathematician, they often ask me: What exactly do you do? What’s your typical day like? In the minds of most people, mathematics is all about numbers. They imagine mathematicians spending their days staring at…
Halfway into his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe,” the M.I.T. physicist Max Tegmark describes his “Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde Strategy”: During the day he would do respectable work on mainstream topics in cosmology, but at night he would “transform into the evil…
Experiment is the ultimate judge of a theory, and that’s why we need expensive and sophisticated machines like CERN’s particle accelerator. But the amazing fact is that scientists like Einstein and Higgs made their discoveries with little more than pen and…
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but in 2001 the Norwegian government established a million-dollar Abel Prize, which is widely considered as an equivalent of the Nobel for mathematicians. This year’s prize was awarded to Pierre Deligne, professor emeritus at the Institute…
What happens when you enter your credit card number online? Every time you enter your credit card number on the Internet, prime numbers spring into action. Before your card number is sent over the wires, it must be encrypted for security, and…
It is through math that we learned Earth isn’t flat and that it revolves around the sun, that our universe is curved, expanding, full of dark energy, and quite possibly has more than three spatial dimensions. But since we can’t really…
“If we are to give students the right tools to navigate an increasingly math-driven world, we must teach them early on that mathematics is not just about numbers and how to solve equations but about concepts and ideas.”
