This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I was enchanted with the words metonymy and ...

Among the most common tools in electrical engineering and computer science are rectangular grids of numbers known as matrices. The numbers in a matrix can represent data, and they can also represent ...

Computer scientists are a demanding bunch. For them, it’s not enough to get the right answer to a problem — the goal, almost always, is to get the answer as efficiently as possible. Take the act of ...