One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science. Irene Pérez for 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 discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was a rough sketch of a mathematical proof that memory was more powerful than computer scientists believed: A small amount would be ...