I was recently in Cambridge—not the big one with Harvard and MIT and all that, but the small market town in England. It would be an unvisited East Anglian backwater today if a few scholars had not ...

Charles Petzold's book The Annotated Turing, which covers Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers and much of the background material needed to understand it, is more than decent. As a result, I was ...

Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise ...

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 ...

When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann proposed a question called the ...