A few weeks ago, I was hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

It's a place that's notorious for its terrible weather, which can shift suddenly and sometimes

dangerously in like a heartbeat.

After a couple of calm, drizzly hours up in the alpine zone above the tree line, there was, if you'll excuse the expression,

a sudden change in the wind. Just like that, we were being lashed with a cold rain that seemed

at its worst moments to be coming from every direction at once. Overall, the wind was blowing

one way, but the rocks all around us, the peaks and valleys were spinning

it off into what we officially call turbulence, or the seeming chaos that occurs when the flow

of a fluid, like wind blowing in one direction or water flowing in a stream, passes through a complex,

real-world environment.

As you might imagine,

understanding such a complicated system mathematically

must be insanely complex.

So complex, in fact,

that figuring it out could be worth

a cool million dollars.

Welcome to the Quanta podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math.

I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine.

Math petitions are never the type to shy away from a seemingly impossible problem, and I feel like figuring out how to bring order to something as inherently chaotic as turbulence is one of those.

And sure enough, recently there was a major advance in understanding the math of turbulence, and here to discuss it with us is one of Quanta's

staff writers, Joe Howlett. Welcome, Joe. Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Joe, you're Quanta's math writer, which is not exactly a common position in the journalism world.

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