Mathematics

Why is 1+1 equals 2?

It was a usual practise for me to ask my young and energetic audience, my students, about what they thought about a particular topic before I share my thoughts. Once the fact is revealed, both sides of the stage remain in satisfaction equillibrium which, ...

Blog Post - Madhu Kodappully - Feb 9 2010 - 11:27pm

‘i’ have indeed been complex!

I was off to a very important discussion on the next day. As usual, there were butterflies in my stomach wondering on how my story would be accepted by my critics, my dearest students. Ever since I knew me, I have always been cutting loose from the real me ...

Blog Post - Madhu Kodappully - Feb 12 2010 - 1:13am

A 0.01 P-value Just Doesn't Cut It

John Timmer comments on the problem of modern biomedical research and statistics: we can now measure so much more than our statistics can handle. In a typical genome-wide association study, you're testing so many hypotheses that the favored 0.05, 0.01 ...

Article - Michael White - Mar 4 2010 - 8:50pm

Irrational Exuberance – Thank Goodness It's Pi Day!

March 14th is Pi Day, and that's official! This tradition was started at the Exploratorium, in San Francisco, and 2010 will be their 22nd year of irrational exuberance. It also coincides with Einstein's date of birth – which was on 14 March 1879 ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 8 2010 - 11:33am

Science 2.0 Promotes Math Literacy With Baseball Predictions

Spring training is just getting underway for Major League Baseball, and that means it's time for Bruce Bukiet, associate professor of Mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, to make his annual predictions about the outcome of the season ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2010 - 8:49pm

Pi Grows To Record Digits: But Is This Normal Behaviour?

On 31 December 2009, Fabrice Bellard announced that he had set a new world record for the most number of digits of the number pi. His algorithm has calculated the first 2.7 trillion digits of this famous mathematical constant, beating the previous record o ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 10 2010 - 3:40am

Hyperseeing- Art, Mathematics and Architecture

The International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture (ISAMA) has published HYPERSEEING regularly since fall 2006. HYPERSEEING offers a lively mix of articles, news, reviews of books and exhibits, announcements, and even cartoons. One issue ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 14 2010 - 11:46pm

The Scientific Way To Pick NCAA Basketball Winners

If you're trying to pick winners for this year's NCAA basketball tournament, ignore a team's seeding, which is statistically insignificant after the Sweet Sixteen, a new Journal of Gambling Business and Economics study reports. The paper sug ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 15 2010 - 2:55pm

"You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms." Says Mathematics Genius

In 2002 Grigori Perelman started to publish his proof of the Poincare Conjecture. Shunning peer-reviewed journals he published directly on arXiv. In 2006 he was awarded the Fields Medal for his achievement, and became the first ever mathematician to refuse ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 24 2010 - 8:49am

Some Notes On Data Smoothing

Some Notes On Data Smoothing The topic of data filtering can be pretty obscure for the general public.  Taking raw data and smoothing out the lumps can seem like deliberate falsification.  It isn't. In the early days of space exploration it was only ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Apr 17 2010 - 8:08am