Ke Xu

Water in a river flows around rocks, air bends around an airplane wing: these motions are described by equations that are hard to solve even on a powerful computer. Neural networks can approximate such solutions, but they often err when data is collected at only a few points or is noisy.

Fall 1956. Kurt Gödel puts pen to paper, drafting a question for the dying John von Neumann: Can the satisfiability of a Boolean formula be checked faster than brute-force trial and error? The answer comes 69 years later, and it turns out to be the bite of the logical ouroboros, the mythical serpent that devours its own tail. The serpent is born from randomness.