Intro

Hi, I’m Mordechai, a writer and science journalist. That’s my face there. My journalistic writing has appeared at outlets like Quanta Magazine, New Scientist, Wired, Vice, Nautilus, Symmetry, Physics, Inverse, and Astronomy. I’m passionate about good writing and the journalistic coverage of computer science and artificial intelligence. You can find links to my prior journalistic work below.

Background

I hold a master’s degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin, where I did research on the design of three-dimensional magnetic confinement fusion devices. I hold a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas. During college, I studied abroad at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and before college, I attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS), a residential high school program at the University of North Texas. I grew up in Denton, Texas.

I was Quanta’s first staff writer for computer science, and have held writing positions at various other companies and institutions, including MathWorks in Natick, Massachusetts, and Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. I currently live and work in New York.

Funding

From November 2022 to November 2023, my independent journalism work in computer science and AI will be supported by a grant from Open Philanthropy, a grantmaking organization. This grant neither affects my editorial independence nor indicates an endorsement of my writing by the organization.

I sought out grants after leaving Quanta in August 2022, and becoming increasingly informed about what I believe is a severe state of underfunding in science journalism, particularly for areas as important as computer science and AI.

About This Webpage

This webpage is mainly an informal placeholder for my presence on the internet. I’ve occasionally used it to host blog posts, but nowadays I do most of my random musings on Twitter. If you’d like to reach out to say hello or to ask a question, or share a journalistic story idea, please get in touch.

Contact

• Email: mrorvig@gmail.com
• Twitter: @mordecwhy
• Encrypted correspondence available on request (Protonmail/Signal/PGP)

Quanta stories

• Computer Science Proof Unveils Unexpected Form of Entanglement (7/18/22, also at Nautilus)
• Quantum Algorithms Conquer a New Kind of Problem (7/11/22)
• The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs (6/13/22)
• How Computer Scientists Learned to Reinvent the Proof (5/23/22)
• Computer Scientists Prove That Certain Problems Are Truly Hard (5/11/22)
• Researchers Gain New Understanding From Simple AI (4/14/22, also at Nautilus)
• Cryptographers Achieve Perfect Secrecy With Imperfect Devices (2/25/22)
• Computer Scientists Prove Why Bigger Neural Networks Do Better (2/10/22)
• Qubits Can Be as Safe as Bits, Researchers Show (1/6/22)
• Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code (11/24/21)
• Mathematicians Prove Melting Ice Stays Smooth (10/7/21, also at Wired)
• Mathematicians Identify Threshold at Which Shapes Give Way (6/3/21)

Other feature stories

• Supersized AIs: Are truly intelligent machines just a matter of scale? (New Scientist, 10/6/21)
• How to spot an alien megastructure: The new search for Dyson spheres (New Scientist, 1/27/21)
• OK, WTF Are ‘Virtual Particles’ and Do They Actually Exist? (Vice, 5/11/20)

Other news stories

• How doomed matter reveals the inner secrets of black holes (Astronomy, 10/20/21)
• AI Generated Art Scene Explodes as Hackers Create Groundbreaking New Tools (Vice, 7/11/21)
• NASA Is Quietly Funding a Hunt for Alien Megastructures (Vice, 7/9/21)
• This Brain-Scanning Quantum Device Is a ‘Game Changer,’ Researchers Say (Vice, 6/18/21)
• We Should Look for Star-Sized Supercomputers to Find Aliens, This Researcher Says (Vice, 6/10/21)
• Scientists Successfully Entangled Quantum ‘Memories’. What? (Vice, 6/3/21)
• Nasa’s Voyager 1 Hears A Faint Sound New To Science Coming From Deep Space (Inverse, 5/11/21)
• Ingenuity: Hear The First Sound Of A Helicopter On Mars (Inverse, 5/7/21)
• Scientists Create Self-Replicating Chemicals to Help Explain the Origins of Life (Vice, 3/10/21)
• Machines Are Inventing New Math We’ve Never Seen (Vice, 2/10/21)
• CONNIE gets closer to picturing reactor neutrinos (Symmetry, 7/14/20)
• Better Electron Bunches for X-Ray Lasers (Physics, 3/30/20)
• Mathematicians Are Studying Planet-Sized Quantum Computers With God-Like Powers (Vice, 2/11/20)
• The CIA’s Infamous, Unsolved Cryptographic Puzzle Gets a ‘Final Clue’ (Vice, 1/31/20)
• This Computer Is Made Entirely Out of Chemicals (Vice, 1/7/20)
• Neutron star particles go under the LHC microscope (Symmetry, 12/12/19)
• Number Theorist Fears All Published Math Is Wrong (Vice, 9/26/19)