One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Complexity theory is a fundamental branch of theoretical computer science that categorises computational problems according to their inherent difficulty and the resources required to solve them. At ...

Complexity theory is a branch of computer science that studies the resources required to solve computational problems, particularly focusing on the classification of problems based on their inherent ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...