You Can Approximate Pi by Dropping Needles on the Floor

In this simulation, 66 of the 100 needles crossed a line (you can count ’em). Using this number, we get a value of pi at 3.0303—which is not 3.14—but it's not terrible for just 100 needles. With ...

A.I. Writes Buggy Code. A Silicon Valley Start-Up Wants to Fix It.

These start-ups, including Axiom Math and Harmonic, both in Palo Alto, Calif., and Logical Intelligence in San Francisco, hope to create A.I. systems that can automatically verify computer code in ...

Cracking the code: How a 'prediction machine' is resurrecting the Singapore Stone

Several years ago, my linguistic research team and I began developing a computational tool we call "Read-y Grammarian." Our ...
Smithsonian Magazine

The Accidental History of the @ Symbol

Although the first documented use of @ was in 1536, the symbol did not rise from modern obscurity until 1971. Illustration by Erik Marinovich Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by ...