Mathematics

Statistical Mechanics Of Saturn's Rings

How does something made of loose particles sometimes behave like a solid, liquid or gas? For example, dry sand acts like a solid when you stand on it but like a liquid when you try to scoop some up in your hand. Or how Saturn's rings act like a fluid. ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 13 2011 - 11:28am

Who Is Numerically The Best Tennis Player Of All Time?

Comparing athletes across generations is always difficult- in football, for example, players are bigger and stronger but before the hashmark changes of the early 1970s, when the field truly had a strong and weak side, a running back like Gale Sayers could ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 2 2011 - 10:32am

March Madness- Trust The Math To Win Your Betting Pool

If you want to win the NCAA College Basketball Tournament office pool and know nothing about basketball, the good news is you have just as much chance as devoted college basketball fans unless you get all crazy about it.    One solution is to try and play ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 8 2011 - 3:17pm

What's So Spooky About Action At A Distance?

This is a very short note, just to help me get a feel for how this editor works. What's so spooky about action at a distance? Entanglement of separated electrons seems no more odd to me than a parameterized hyperboloid of two sheets .  Change the para ...

Article - John Starrett - Mar 19 2011 - 6:38pm

A pi in the face of Republicans

A new bill, sponsored by Alabama Congresswoman Martha Roby, is going up before Congress- HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, which declares the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. Here's a blurb from the article: "That ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Mar 24 2011 - 10:30pm

Survival Of The Stupidest

Is stupidity rising? Are we witnessing an alarming proliferation of irrationality and an exuberance of ignorance?  ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Apr 5 2011 - 10:29pm

Finding Alice In The Quaternion Looking Glass

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Article - Colin Keenan - May 31 2011 - 12:48pm

Higgs Boson- Forget Science, What Do Bookies Think?

The LHC and its lower-energy counterpart in the US, Tevatron, have reported some important Higgs news this past week- details of six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at CERN and another in Chicago coming up. ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 7 2012 - 10:16pm

The Say Of The Week

" A blind use of tail-area probabilities allows the statistician  to cheat, by claiming at a suitable point in a sequential  experiment that he has a train to catch. This must have been known to Khintchine when he proved in 1924 that, in sequential b ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 29 2011 - 2:30pm

Bad News For Anti-Science Hippies- Food Prices Lead To Riots

Complexity theorists have some bad news for people who insist that unless it carries an organic label, food is evil; a group from the New England Complex Systems Institute says they've discovered what will trigger riots around the world in under two y ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Feb 24 2012 - 1:03am