It is impossible to imagine a master chef who doesn’t know how to cook, a cabinet maker who doesn’t know anything about carpentry, or a pianist who can’t read music. All three sound like ...

What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it ...

I’m spotting a worrying trend among startup founders who seem to think that running a startup is effectively a get-rich-quick scheme. Apart from that mindset being wrong and naive, I suspect there’s ...

How does it feel when someone claims to know more about you than you know about yourself? One of the central tenets of my education, training, and theoretical perspective has always been that we are ...

It’s not often that 5-year-olds can grasp questions at the frontiers of computer science, but it can happen. Suppose, for instance, that a kindergartner named Alice has two apples, but she prefers ...

What does it take to solve hard problems: There are 3 things essential to problem solving. The right paradigm Pattern recognition Insight The right paradigm: This is the most important part about ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...