Find out how a story starting with the simple notion of counting ends in a revolutionary new way of doing maths that uses computers to harness the power of human collaboration!
Mark Braverman has won the Abacus Medal for developing the theory of information complexity. He told us about the role of communication in computation, and why a mathematical view can help you understand how to solve problems while sharing as little information as possible.
We talk to Chiara Marletto about a new way of looking at the physical world that may solve some of the problems physicists are currently struggling with.
You may not have heard his name, but you're making use of his work
every single day: Claude Shannon, hailed the father of the
information age, would have turned 100 this week.
If I tell you that it's Monday today, then you know it's not any of the other six days of the week. Perhaps the information content of my statement should be measured in terms of the number of all the other possibilities it excludes? Back in the 1920s this consideration led to a very simple formula to measure information.
Kolmogorov complexity gives a high value to strings of symbols that are essentially random. But isn't randomness essentially meaningless? Should a measure of information assign a low value to it? The concept of sophistication addresses this question.