Software development
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4 hours agoThe AI Divide: Engineers Who Multiply Problems vs Engineers Who Eliminate Them
Writing code is now cheap, but the consequences of mistakes in software development remain costly and can scale quickly.
Finn described his experience traveling for a sales call, stating, 'They wanted me to visit a promising new prospect that was 'in the same region' as the client I came to visit.' This led to unexpected travel challenges.
Faltings was awarded the prize for work proving central results in the theory of algebraic equations linking whole numbers together. The prize highlights Faltings's work in 1983 on the theory of Diophantine equations, which are equations involving sums and powers of unknown numbers for which the solutions have to be rational - meaning they can be written as a fraction of two whole numbers, or integers.
For more than two millennia, mathematicians have produced a growing heap of pi equations in their ongoing search for methods to calculate pi faster and faster. The pile of equations has now grown into the thousands, and algorithms now can generate an infinitude. Each discovery has arrived alone, as a fragment, with no obvious connection to the others. But now, for the first time, centuries of pi formulas have been shown to be part of a unified, formerly hidden structure.
Liam Delap has an interesting party trick that you wouldn't really expect a footballer to pull out of the bag. The Chelsea forward has gone on video a few times showing off his bizarre mathematical ability to quickly calculate the cube roots of large numbers.
To celebrate International Women's Day, held each year on 8 March, Nature asked six previous winners of awards given in partnership with Nature to name a woman who has had a positive impact on their career and well-being. This year, Nature has focused on winners of the Estée Lauder Companies' annual Inspiring Women in Science award, the inaugural Sony Women in Technology award - given to women who are using technology to drive positive change for society and the planet - and the annual John Maddox Prize.
From my own graduate work, I know that it's only when you hit an experimental roadblock that you get to refine your hypothesis and hone your technical skills. But my new graduate students feel like they've failed when their first experiments don't work as planned. It takes a special kind of perseverance to be an independent researcher, and I see this lack of confidence in many of my students.
The core of the argument is that agentic AI will replace human labor in most white-collar industries and will do so with dizzying speed. The consequent abrupt and massive job displacements will lead to crashes in property values and local tax bases, with devastating impacts on communities and much of the public sector.
We're fortunate to stand on the work of giants. Every time we cross a suspension bridge or hear a brilliant piece of music, we experience the spark of someone else's genius. We don't need to understand every theory to benefit from it - and the same is true in building a business. You don't need a computer science degree to think like an engineer - but doing so can help you build smarter, faster and with fewer mistakes.
In the weeks leading up to September 1891, mathematician Georg Cantor prepared an ambush. For years he had sparred - philosophically, mathematically and emotionally - with his formidable rival Leopold Kronecker, one of Germany's most influential mathematicians. Kronecker thought that mathematics should deal only with whole numbers and proofs built from them and therefore rejected Cantor's study of infinity. "God made the integers," Kronecker once said. "All else is the work of man."
Five years ago, mathematicians Dawei Chen and Quentin Gendron were trying to untangle a difficult area of algebraic geometry involving differentials, elements of calculus used to measure distance along curved surfaces. While working on one theorem, they ran into an unexpected roadblock: Their argument depended on a strange formula from number theory, but they were unable to solve or justify it. In the end, Chen and Gendron wrote a paper presenting their idea as a conjecture, rather than a theorem.
Practical physics classes were competing with the allure of sports in the 1800s, and top tips for the best-smelling garden, in this week's peek at the Nature archives. 100 years ago doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00297-2 This article features text from Nature's archive. By its historical nature, the archive includes some images, articles and language that by twenty-first-century standards are offensive and harmful. Find out more.
OpenAI's GPT-5.2 Pro does better at solving sophisticated math problems than older versions of the company's top large language model, according to a new study by Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute.