People usually talk about the race to the bottom in artificial intelligence as a bad thing. But it’s different when you’re discussing loss functions. Loss functions are a crucial but frequently ...

Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, called the Fourier transform, ...

To some, METR’s “time horizon plot” indicates that AI utopia—or apocalypse—is close at hand. The truth is more complicated. MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy ...

As mathematical abstractions go, graphs are among the simplest. Scatter a bunch of points in a plane. Connect some of them with lines. That’s all a graph is. And yet they are incredibly powerful. They ...