Physical Sciences

Four hundred years ago, no less a sailor than Sir Walter Raleigh set mathematicians the challenge of packing cannonballs onto the deck of a ship for maximum quantity. The astronomer Johannes Kepler offered a solution, later known as Kepler’s Conjecture  – a mathematical equation we see today in supermarkets that stack oranges into pyramids. 

In coming decades as coastal communities around the world are expected to encounter sea-level rise, the general expectation has been that people’s migration toward the coast will slow or reverse in many places.

However, new research co-authored by Princeton University scholars shows that migration to the coast could actually accelerate in some places despite sea-level change, contradicting current assumptions.

Using that mission to help synthetic chemists at the bench, researchers have developed an open-source software tool that provides them with a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm for everyday work, folding what’s been learned in the machine learning optimization field into synthetic chemistry.  

On April 1, 2020, as the pandemic threatened to overwhelm area hospitals, Andrew Leifer was looking for a way to help. The Princeton University physicist connected with doctors at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia who were working to prevent a looming shortage in machines used to keep patients breathing.