Mathematics

What Brewing Coffee Can Teach Us About Modeling Anesthesia

By Michael Greshko, Inside Science – Mathematics that can describe coffeepots, forest fires and flu outbreaks may also underpin the brain’s response to anesthesia, a new study suggests. The mathematical model of the brain, published in Physical Review Let ...

Article - Michael Greshko - Sep 25 2015 - 7:30am

Resonating Euler Spirals and Prolate Spheroids

You might call it a two-tone football.  If you're a real mathematician you may be able to explain to me what the real name of the thing is.  I'm not a real mathematician but I occasionally wrangle with math problems as visualized surfaces in my h ...

Blog Post - Michael Martinez - Oct 15 2015 - 10:28am

Mathematically Modeling The Mind

Try to remember a phone number, and you're using what's called your sequential memory. This kind of memory, in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas, underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2015 - 1:49pm

How Understanding Baseball Can Improve Earthquake Predictions

Major League Baseball can help understand why maps used to predict shaking in future earthquakes often do poorly.  Earthquake hazard maps use assumptions about where, when, and how big future earthquakes will be to predict the level of shaking. The result ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 1 2015 - 8:22am

Discovery Of Pi In Quantum Mechanics A 'Cunning Piece Of Magic'

While most people associate the mathematical constant π (pi) with arcs and circles, mathematicians are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. Two University of Rochester scientists have found it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the ener ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2015 - 12:19pm

Global Warming Disaster Could Suffocate All Life On Earth, Say Mathematicians

Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to an estimate led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester's Dep ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 6 2015 - 9:00am

'Freak' Ocean Waves Hit Without Warning, Says Math Simulation

Mariners have long spoken of 'walls of water' appearing from nowhere in the open seas, that is why freak waves are called freak waves. Oceanographers have disregarded such stories and instead suggested that rogue waves- enormous surface waves th ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 16 2015 - 12:00pm

How Many Ways Can You Arrange 128 Tennis Balls? An Apparently Impossible Problem Solved

Here is a problem with truly huge numbers, thought to be unsolvable.  Imagine that you have 128 tennis balls, and can arrange them in any way you like. How many arrangements are possible? According to a new paper, the answer is about 10^250, also known as ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 28 2016 - 8:39am

On Mathematical Models

When a system is well understood, a well-constructed mathematical model of that system can make realistic predictions based on the data sets fed into it. However, when a system is not well-understood, but one insists on making a mathematical of it, anyway, ...

Blog Post - Frank Schnell - Feb 2 2016 - 7:51am

A Workshop On Applied Statistics

A Sino-Italian workshop on Applied Statistics was held today at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. The organizers were Alessandra Brazzale and Alessandra Salvan from the Department of Statistical Sciences, and Giorgio Picc ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 2 2016 - 3:19pm