Pankaj Sharma is one of the world's premier speakers on Leadership and Personal Mastery. As a presenter, Sharma has the rare ability to electrify an audience yet deliver uncommonly original and useful insights that lead to individuals doing their best work, teams providing superb results and organizations becoming unbeatable.
Pankaj Sharma is also a Research Scientist.
Friday, September 23, 2022
High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last
Plus: Rare "chimera" synchrony seen in nature for the first time; The new math of wrinkling; Reed-Solomon codes, explained
High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last
By CHARLIE WOOD
A new atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory.
"Students haven't been taught that math is discovery," says Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving. "Math is a creative discipline—you're creating castles in the sky." Rusczyk has a vision for bringing "joyous, beautiful math" — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere.
Past Quanta Coverage of 2023 Breakthrough Prize Winners The 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to four pioneers of quantum information science: Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, David Deutsch and Peter Shor. Dan Garisto reports on the awards for Scientific American. • Among his many contributions to physics, Charles Bennett solved the longstanding paradox of Maxwell's demon, as Jonathan O'Callaghan explained for Quanta in 2021. Bennett's insights linked the studies of information and thermodynamics as disciplines. • David Deutsch contributed immensely to our understanding of quantum mechanics and the universe. In May, Philip Ball wrote for Quanta about his most recent accomplishment: Deutsch rewrote the laws of physics in terms of simple statements about what is possible. • Peter Shor's discoveries revolutionized quantum computing. In consecutive years, he devised his famous encryption-breaking algorithm and figured out how quantum computers will correct their errors. In 2021 Katie McCormick explained how Shor's error-correction scheme work.
The 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to the computer scientist Daniel Spielman for multiple discoveries in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Spielman spoke with Quanta about his work this past summer.
Three 2023 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences were also announced yesterday, honoring three pairs of scientists for their work: Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, and Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa. Amanda Heidt reports on the awards for The Scientist. • Brangwynne and Hyman were recognized for their studies that showed the importance of liquid-liquid phase separation as a means for organizing cellular contents without membrane barriers. Viviane Callier wrote for Quanta about their work in 2021. • Yanagisawa and Mignot were recognized for their discovery of the genetic switches that cause the brain to sleep, and which malfunction in narcolepsy. Veronique Greenwood wrote about their work for Quanta in 2017. • Hassabis and Jumper were honored for developing the program AlphaFold, which revolutionized the prediction of protein structures. Stephen Ornes wrote about the transformer neural networks that are an important component of AlphaFold in March.
