Many people don’t know what mathematics really is, or why mathematicians do it. Now mathematicians need to answer that question for themselves and explain it to the rest of the world — quickly. How they answer will determine what happens next.
“This is what happens when a star like ours reaches the end of its lifecycle, sheds its outer layers, and collapses into a white dwarf, spending the next many trillions of years cooling into a black dwarf while its stellar mass reaches into interstellar space, eventually contributing their elements to forming planets.”
No less a satirist than Jonathan Swift made it one of his many targets in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), imagining an elaborate machine of wood and wire called “the Engine” that automatically generates text, though few remember it — or rather, few remembered it until the rise of large language models in the real world.
“Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies. They’re incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected,” team member Jamie Williams of the University of Warwick said […] “It’s a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited.”
On this day in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe surrendered to the US cavalry
Other studies have found signs that babies are capable of surprisingly complex forms of thought long before they can speak. They can recognize that a face is more than the sum of its parts; they can carry out simple forms of math in their heads.
On this day in 1918, Cher Ami carried a message that saved an American battalion
Archaeologists have recovered 48 prehistoric arrows from melting ice in Norway, including one that’s estimated to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old.