Science News of the Year: 1998
Back to Science News of 1998
Mathematics & Computers
- Mathematicians proved Kepler's assertion that the pattern of neatly
stacked oranges in a grocery—a face-centered cubic packing—fills space more
efficiently than any other arrangement of identical spheres (Aug.
15, vol. 154: p. 103*).
- Cryptographers showed that monitoring the power usage of a smart
card's microcircuitry can provide data for breaching the card's security (June 20, vol. 153: p. 388*). They also dramatically reduced
the time required to identify the numerical key for decoding a message encoded with the
widely used Data Encryption Standard (Aug. 1, vol. 154: p. 77).
- Two teams of mathematicians tabulated all knotted loops having 16 or
fewer crossings and came up with 1,701,936 different knots (Oct. 10, vol. 154: p. 231).
- Mathematicians demonstrated there are infinitely many primes among
whole numbers of the form a2 + b4 (Jan. 3, vol. 153:
p. 4).
- A prototype computer program that plays expert poker made an
auspicious debut at a human-versus-computer exhibition (July
18, vol. 154: p. 40*).
- A college sophomore participating in the Great Internet Mersenne
Prime Search discovered the largest known prime number—a 909,526-digit behemoth (Feb.
21, vol. 153: p. 127).
- A newly discovered set of approximate solutions of Newton's equations
for gravitational attraction corresponds to strings of equally spaced masses chasing each
other around closed loops (Sept. 5, vol. 154: p. 149).
- The explosive growth of the World Wide Web focused attention on
improving search techniques and developing methods to characterize and model Internet
traffic (May 2, vol. 153: p. 278*); May 2, vol. 153, p.
286; Oct. 10, vol. 154: p. 255).
- A cryptographer invented an alternative to encryption, whereby
confidential information is broken into segments that are tagged and inserted into a
larger document (May 2, vol. 153: p. 286).
- Researchers proposed that a network of chaotic systems can operate as
a computer (Oct. 3, vol. 154: p. 217).
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