Erica Klarreich

Mathematics and Science Journalist

Berkeley, California

I am an award-winning mathematics and science journalist whose work has appeared in Quanta, Nature, The Atlantic, New Scientist and many other publications, and has been reprinted in the 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2020 volumes of "The Best Writing on Mathematics."

Erica Klarreich

Mathematics and Science Journalist

Berkeley, California

Perplexing the Web, One Probability Puzzle at a Time
August 29, 2024 — The mathematician Daniel Litt has driven social media users to distraction with a series of simple-seeming but counterintuitive probability puzzles.
Quanta Magazine
Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture
July 19, 2024 — In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program.
Quanta Magazine
Merging Fields, Mathematicians Go the Distance on Old Problem
April 1, 2024 — Mathematicians have illuminated what sets of points can look like if the distances between them are all whole numbers.
Quanta Magazine
Algorithmic Advance: The Group Isomorphism Problem
Feb, 2024 — A new paper has presented the first substantial progress in a half-century on one of the fundamental questions in the overlap between math and computer science.
Communications of the ACM
A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers
October 26, 2013 — New work attacks a long-standing barrier to understanding how prime numbers are distributed.
Quanta Magazine
Mathematics Reporting: An Uncrowded Niche for Writers
April 11, 2023 — Compared to most STEM fields, mathematics receives scant coverage in the popular press.
The Open Notebook
Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile
April 4, 2023 — The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way.
Quanta Magazine
Emmy Murphy Is a Mathematician Who Finds Beauty in Flexibility
March 27, 2023 — The prize-winning geometer feels most fulfilled when exploring the fertile ground where constraint meets creation.
Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians Roll Dice and Get Rock-Paper-Scissors
Jan 19, 2023 — Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.
Quanta Magazine
Mathematical Trio Advances Centuries-Old Number Theory Problem
Nov 29, 2022 — The work — the first-ever limit on how many whole numbers can be written as the sum of two cubed fractions — makes significant headway on “a recurring embarrassment for number theorists.”
Quanta Magazine
‘Monumental’ Math Proof Solves Triple Bubble Problem and More
Oct 6, 2022 — The decades-old Sullivan’s conjecture, about the best way to minimize the surface area of a bubble cluster, was thought to be out of reach for three bubbles and up — until a new breakthrough result.
Quanta Magazine
The Math Evangelist Who Preaches Problem-Solving
Sept 13, 2022 — Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, has a vision for bringing “joyous, beautiful math” — and problem-solving — to classrooms everywhere.
Quanta Magazine
A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems about Prime Numbers
July 5, 2022 — On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.
Quanta Magazine
In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math
July 5, 2022 — With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.
Quanta Magazine
Researchers Achieve "Absurdly Fast" Algorithm for Network Flow
June 8, 2022 — Computer scientists can now solve a decades-old problem in practically the time it takes to write it down.
Quanta Magazine
Which Computational Universe Do We Live In?
Apr 18, 2022 — Computer scientists want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible.
Quanta Magazine

About

Erica Klarreich

I have been writing about mathematics and science for a popular audience for more than 20 years. A mathematician before I became a full-time journalist, I try to convey the essence of complex mathematical ideas to non-mathematicians, and give them a sense of the beauty and depth of mathematics.

I also enjoy plunging into topics far from my mathematical roots, and have written about fields such as economics, computer science, medicine, and biology — often as these fields relate to mathematics, but often simply for their own sake.

As a freelance journalist based in Berkeley, California, I have written for many publications, including Quanta Magazine, Nature, New Scientist, American Scientist, Nautilus, and Science News, for which I was the mathematics correspondent for several years. My work has also been syndicated in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired and other publications.

I was journalist in residence at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in 2002 and at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley in 2016. My work has been reprinted in the 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2020 volumes of "The Best Writing on Mathematics."

I received the 2021 Communications Award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, which recognizes journalists and other communicators who, on a sustained basis, bring accurate mathematical information to nonmathematical audiences.

I am a graduate of the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stony Brook University.

Contact me at klarreic@gmail.com.

Follow me on Twitter at @EricaKlarreich