It’s a project funded by the recently passed Jim Simons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanta_Magazine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons_Foundation

I'm sure the article author would love to know this!

Unfortunately I have not found this to be true (though it is in this case). There are quite a number of articles that are misleading or flat out false.

The best example is the quantum wormhole article and video[0,1], because it is egregious and doesn't take much nuance or expertise see the issues. I'm glad they made a note and wrote a follow-up[2], but all this illustrates what is wrong with the picture. For one, the article and video were published the same day as it was published in Nature[3]. Sure, they are getting wind of the preprints, but in this case there was none! They're often acting as a PR firm for many of the big universities and companies, unfortunately so is Nature.

The article was published Nov 30th, but the note didn't come till March 29th![4] You might think, oh it took that much time to figure out that there were problems, but no, only a few days after the publication (Dec 2nd) even Ars Technica was posting about the misinformation. They even waited over a month after Kobrin, Schuster, and Yao placed their comment on ArXiv[6]. Scott Aaronson had already written about it[7]. There was so much dissent in that time frame that it is hard to explain it as an accident. A week or two and it wouldn't be an issue.

But I think Peter Woit explains it best[8] (published, yes, Nov 30th).

  This work is getting the full-press promotional package: no preprint on the arXiv, embargoed info to journalists, with reveal at a press conference, a cover story in Nature, accompanied by a barrage of press releases. This is the kind of PR effort for a physics result I’ve only seen before for things like the Higgs and LIGO gravitational wave discoveries. It would be appropriate I suppose if someone actually had built a wormhole in a lab and teleported information through it, as advertised.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormhole-experiment-called-in...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329191417/https://www.quant...

[5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...

[6] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07897

[7] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6871

[8] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181

Kind of reminds me of https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/

MIT's PRIMES program does exactly this - they give advanced high school students a mentor who picks out a problem, gets them up to speed on what is known, and then they work on the problem for a year and publish their results. It tends to work best with problems which have a computational aspect, so that the students can get some calculations done on the computer to get the ball rolling.

It is very possible!

Just this year these girls discovered a proof for the Pythagorean theorem using nothing but trigonometry, a feat considered impossible until they did it: https://youtu.be/VHeWndnHuQs

Monkeys with typewriters, or teenagers with MacBooks?

Yes that's the education system. But I suspect you mean in some automated turk fashion.

Well, except for in Florida - where homeomorphism is banned in public schools.

Intuitively, just imagine picking a starting point on each of the circle and the knot. Now walk at different speeds such that you get back to the starting point at the same time.

In fact, that's what the knot is: a continuous, bijective mapping from the circle to the image of the mapping, i.e., the knot. (As the linked answer says.)

Edit: I see now that the article already has this intuitive explanation but with ants.

I agree - I would happily pay for a print subscription and donate a second one to the nearest high school (although teens may no longer visit the library, so you'd probably have to spread the magazines in toilets, corridors and cafes).

I, on the other hand, prefer the modern media for the ability to include animations etc.

> shape’s volume dwindles to zero, while its surface area grows infinitely large

I think it's easy to grok when you get it, but that's certainly counter-intuitive on the surface, no?

Think of a 3-dimensional object (unlike a surface, which is 2-dimensional, regardless of the shape), with the volume zero. That's not easy to wrap your head around.

At my age, I really have to restrain myself of these interests to spare my time for some other stuffs. :(

I don’t think the question is an active research area, or the problem would probably already be solved. However, it’s nonetheless extremely impressive. I couldn’t have done this at 21 with a lot more experience under my belt.