When Rediet Abebe arrived at Harvard University as an undergraduate in 2009, she planned to study mathematics. But her experiences with the Cambridge public schools soon changed her plans. Abebe, 29, ...

As society attempts to solve more and more problems computationally, the need for efficient algorithms to solve these problems continues to grow. Just as importantly, to be able to apply or adapt ...

The question of how much power algorithms have over our lives has a topical edge. Already there are lines of code that tell us what to watch, whom to date, and even whom to send to jail. In Hello ...

Computer scientists are abuzz over a fast new algorithm for solving one of the central problems in the field. (January 15, 2017, update: On January 4, Babai retracted ...

Back in 1996, a computer scientist called Lov Grover at Bell Labs in New Jersey unveiled an unusual algorithm for searching through a database. Searching algorithms are among the most important in ...

IN AN ideal world the data on which a scientific study is based should be, if not publicly available, then at least available to other researchers with a legitimate interest in asking. Sadly, this is ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...