Topological photonics can force propagating light to travel in a single direction—allowing researchers to route optical signals around corners and past defects without any of it scattering backward.

Today:Early fog in the far southwest clears quickly. Most areas stay dry with sunshine and variable cloud, though northern and northeastern regions may see isolated showers. Light winds overall, ...

Physicists have long struggled to unite quantum mechanics—the theory governing tiny particles—with Einstein’s theory of gravity, which explains the behavior of stars, planets, and the structure of the ...

Shortest path algorithms sit at the heart of modern graph theory and many of the systems that move people, data, and goods around the world. After nearly seventy years of relying on the same classic ...

When Edsger W. Dijkstra published his algorithm in 1959, computer networks were barely a thing. The algorithm in question found the shortest path between any two nodes on a graph, with a variant ...

Chinese computer scientists have solved a 40-year-old mathematics bottleneck, an advance that might help boost performance in hi-tech areas ranging from chip design and telecommunications to drone ...

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 the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.

Graph theory is an integral component of algorithm design that underlies sparse matrices, relational databases, and networks. Improving the performance of graph algorithms has direct implications to ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a ...

All of us solve a “shortest path” problem many times a day. Unintentionally of course. We solve it on our way work or when we browse the Internet or when we arrange our things on a desk. Sounds a bit… ...