######### Articles INDEX ######### ######### Articles Filters #########

Filter by

Filters

CLOSE

######### TWO COL title #########

Articles

Sort by

######### Articles Sort #########
######### Articles Language Tab #########
######### Article Archive #########
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
The Year in Review
The Editors
As the end of the year approaches, we are delighted to present our second annual review, highlighting the essays that best represent our aims, ambitions, attitudes, and even our animadversions.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
The Chinese Civil Examinations
Hilde De Weerdt
From the end of the sixth century onwards the written civil service examinations became a staple of life in Imperial China. Hilde de Weerdt retraces the development of the examination system.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
The Origins of Python
Lambert Meertens
Since its debut in 1991, Python’s accessibility and rich functionality has helped it gather a huge userbase. Its design was influenced by creator Guido van Rossum’s involvement with an earlier language, ABC.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
The Scent of Flavor
Linda Bartoshuk
It was only in the nineteenth century that flavor was recognized as a sensation distinct from taste. Linda Bartoshuk retraces our understanding of flavor, drawing from her life’s work on the topic.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
When Existence is Inefficient
Allyn Jackson
How hard is it to solve a problem when a solution is guaranteed to exist? It is to address questions like this that the theoretical computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou invented the complexity class PPAD.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
Wacky Jabber
Douglas Hofstadter
A sweetish suite of machine translations of a pseudo-Swedish paragraph concocted by Douglas Hofstadter. The resulting gobbledygook reveals the zombie-like nature of these highly vaunted programs.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
A First Year of Discovery
Casey Papovich
As one of the scientists who will be using the James Webb Space Telescope, Casey Papovich examines how the Webb may answer deep questions about exoplanets and the formation of the first galaxies.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
Bacterial Swimming
Nicholas Taylor
Bacterial motility is powered by the rotation of its filaments, or flagella. Over the past fifty years, imaging advances have allowed the piecing together of the flagellar motor’s organization.
######### Card Article (Articles Content) #########
A Mirror of Nature
Mike Edmunds
The Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in a first-century BCE shipwreck, has proven to be mechanically more sophisticated than anything known from the subsequent millennium.
Endmark

Copyright © Inference 2024

ISSN #2576–4403