Comment by leephillips

17 hours ago

“Noether, who was Jewish, fled from Germany to the U.S., where she died two years later from cancer”

It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt.

I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, but received no reply.

Noether’s real story is recounted in https://amzn.to/3YZZB4W.

21 comments

leephillips

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lich_king  15 hours ago

I have an opinion about the editorial style of Quanta that I don't think it's popular here (judging by how often they get upvoted), but I think it's a symptom of that.

They cover science, but the template they consistently follow is a vague title that oversells the premise and then an article filled with human-interest details and appeals to implications. This makes it easy for everyone to follow along and have an opinion, but I feel like science is a distant backdrop and never the actual subject.

In this article, what's the one tidbit of scientific knowledge that we gain? Dedekind's and Cantor's work is described only in poetic abstractions ("a wedge he could use to pry open the forbidden gates of infinity"). When the focus is writing a gossip column for eloquent people, precision doesn't matter all that much.

  • johngossman  15 hours ago

    I find they are good at identifying interesting topics and writing articles that don't deliver. They remind me of Omni magazine (which I subscribed to at one point). The articles aren't even wrong.

  • MichaelDickens  6 hours ago

    In my experience virtually every magazine is like this, not just Quanta. I open an article hoping to learn something about some scientific or mathematical discovery, but instead the article is almost entirely about the discoverer.

    For learning about actual discoveries, YouTube is much better (Veritasium, Numberphile, 3Blue1Brown, ...).

  • ajkjk  15 hours ago

    I think your opinion is popular here. Quanta is, while better than nothing, universally disappointing. It seems like it would be much easier for them to do a better job -- write less vaguely, fact-check more, assume the reader is a bit more intelligent.

ChocMontePy  9 hours ago

I'm at the library so I checked your book. You said in there:

> However, by October 1933, the issue was straightened out and she was aboard the Bremen, sailing for the United States.

Since she died on 14 April 1935, it was 18 months rather than 2 years.

That sounds like a rather pedantic correction on your part.

That pedanticism is a bad sign and puts your "correction" about the cancer in doubt.

mymacbook  16 hours ago

Thank you! After Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland's Ars Technica article they published using AI (while saying they didn't), and all the while their article was about an AI agent publishing a hit piece on Scott Shambaugh (matplotlib maintainer), I feel like I now assume journalists are using AI and things need to be fact-checked just as we do for our AI interactions.

I appreciate hearing about details like this and getting the source directly. I hope Kristina Armitage and Michael Kanyongolo from Quanta Magazine respond and you can update us!

Scott's Blog on Hit Piece: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... Ars Editor Note: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio... Ars Retraction: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...