Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. “Obviously” is a dangerous word, even in scenarios that seem simple. Suppose, for instance, you need to do an important computation. You ...