Mathematics

Viral Extinction Gets A Mathematical Model

Two researchers from the Spanish Centre of Astrobiology (INTA-CSIC) have developed a mathematical model which demonstrates that a mild increase in the mutation rate of some viruses can reduce their infectivity, driving them to extinction. The study, publis ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 25 2009 - 10:55pm

Can Numerical Modeling Match The Needs Of Science?

Science and engineering are advancing rapidly in part due to ever more powerful computer simulations, yet the most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that all too few U.S. researchers possess. At the same time, affordable computers and comm ...

Article - News Staff - May 3 2009 - 3:39pm

Don’t You Understand The Square Root Of NO?

Frederick II (1194 –1250), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, so I have read, preferred equation-solving contests to watching knights impaling each other in jousting. Certainly, the great mathematician we know today as Fibonacci spent some time at his ...

Article - Robert H Olley - May 14 2009 - 1:34am

MoGo TITAN And Huygens Set A GO World Record

After the victory of IBM's Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of Go has replaced chess as a test bed for research in artificial intelligence (AI). Go is one of the last board games where humans are still able to easily win against AI. Although ...

Article - News Staff - May 14 2009 - 6:42pm

Trigonometry Of Your Car Doors (Should You Buy A Two-Seater Or Four?)

Recently, I was discussing the relative virtues of four-door and two-door cars with a friend. I prefer four-door cars, because they make it much easier for back-seat passengers to get in and out (they make it easier to access the back seat, in general). M ...

Article - Barry Leiba - May 26 2009 - 9:59am

Hash algorithm strength

In his “ Practical Security ” column in the May/June issue of IEEE Internet Computing magazine, Stephen Farrell talks about strength of cipher-suites, and the fact that the overall strength is not simply measured by the key length of which the user is awa ...

Blog Post - Barry Leiba - Jun 5 2009 - 8:01am

A jewel in the rough: for Bente

Given the thousands of years of modern human history, all the brilliant minds that have popped up in science during that time, and especially advances in the last half century or so in computers, how many Mersenne prime numbers do you think we've disc ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Jun 17 2009 - 10:12am

A Mathematics Cure For Jet Lag

Plagued by jet lag?   If we can send a rocket to the moon why can't we figure out how to fly to different time zones and still be fresh?  Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Michigan say they have developed a softwar ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 18 2009 - 7:38pm

Everybody needs more holidays

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Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Jun 22 2009 - 10:40pm

Binary Multiplication, The Computer (and Ethiopian?) Way

In the 360 blog (sub-heading, “12 tables, 24 chairs, and plenty of chalk”), blogger Ξ (Xi) recently wrote about “ Ethiopian Multiplication ” (and followed it up with a series of interesting posts on different ways to multiply, here, here, here, and ...

Article - Barry Leiba - Jun 25 2009 - 3:19pm