Annual Report

Photo by Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.

Illustration by Robbert Dijkgraaf

A conversation with the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson on quantum electrodynamics, climate change and his latest pet project.

Illustration by Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statis- tical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.

Courtesy of John Bush

Surprising oil drop experiments suggest that the quantum world may not be as strange as advertised.

Illustration by Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

New research suggests physicists, computers and brains employ the same procedure to tease out important features from among other irrelevant bits of data.

Illustration by Brendan Monroe for Quanta Magazine

All life on Earth is made of molecules that twist in the same direction. New research reveals that this may not always have been so.

Courtesy of Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani’s monumental work draws deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems.

Illustration by Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

Cosmic dust in the high latitudes of the Milky Way could account for the entire swirl pattern that had been present- ed as proof of a leading Big Bang theory, according to a new data analysis from the Planck satellite.

Illustration by Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.

Photo illustration by Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine; original courtesy of Terence Tao

Paul Erdős, left, and Terence Tao discussing math in 1985. This past August, Tao and four other mathematicians proved an old Erdős conjecture, marking the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart prime numbers can be.throughout physics and mathematics.

Quanta Magazine, the editorially independent online publication the Simons Foundation launched in 2013 to ‘illuminate science,’ continues to expand in size, readership and ambition, covering advances in fundamental research in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. Maintaining its mission to offset what editor-in-chief Thomas Lin calls “a serious gap in mainstream media coverage of math and basic science research,” Quanta produces in-depth feature stories on subjects such as the mysterious universal statistical law called the Tracy-Widom distribution, recent breakthroughs in understanding prime number gaps and tantalizing new ideas about the underlying physics that could drive the origin and evolution of life.

The magazine’s most ambitious editorial project of 2014 also turned out to be among its most popular: a series of long-form features profiling the year’s four Fields medalists and the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize winner. The Fields Medal is informally considered to be the “Nobel Prize of mathematics,” Lin says, “but I was aware that none of the major publications would cover it in a substantive way. That left things wide open for us — not only to portray the mathematicians themselves, who are some of the top minds in the field today, but also to describe their work and bring it to a larger audience.” Quanta spent months planning its coverage, and it paid off: As the most in-depth profiles of this Fields Medal class and their work, the series was widely shared on social media and referenced by the popular websites of NBC News, The New York Times, Business Insider, Der Spiegel and the Financial Times. Quanta contributor and former math professor Erica Klarreich’s profile of topologist Maryam Mirzakhani — the first woman to ever win the Fields Medal — proved especially popular.

Quanta also built on 2013’s five-part big data series with ongoing reporting intended to expand mainstream understanding of the topic. “Scientists know that so-called ‘big data’ is not based purely on the size of a dataset, but also on its complexity or dimensionality,” Lin explains. “There are smaller datasets that are highly complex.” Whereas mainstream media tends to cover the topic from a technological point of view, Lin says that an ongoing theme of Quanta’s coverage is to show how meeting the challenge of big data requires collaboration between multiple scientific disciplines — from the experimentalists gathering field data in unprecedented quantities, to the mathematicians modeling novel patterns in them and the computer scientists building efficient algorithms to process them. “We tried to explain that just having more data is not helpful if you can’t make sense of it,” Lin says.

Quanta expanded its staff with two new hires: Deputy editor Michael Moyer, who previously oversaw award-winning physics and space coverage at Scientific American, joined this year, as did Olena Shmahalo, a former advertising art director. Moyer now spearheads Quanta’s expanding life science coverage. Shmahalo leads Quanta’s efforts to enhance the publication’s photography and illustrations; she also commissions and designs custom infographics that provide another way for readers to understand difficult theoretical concepts.

Lin’s plans for the coming year include video content to enhance engagement with its written reporting. “This is why Quanta exists,” Lin says. “We have the expertise to do this kind of coverage well, and it does make an impact.”