Mathematics

Predicting Disease Vectors In A Population

How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a disease will spread and a new model seeks to lay the foundation for new zoonotic disease spread thinking By outlining a ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 6 2013 - 10:45am

A Prime Valentine's Day

It is somewhat surreal to see the discovery of the largest prime number paraded on prime time broadcast media. Mathematicians around the world are asked to explain the significance of this discovery in layman’s terms, which is up there with physicists tryi ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Dec 9 2013 - 3:53pm

Math Gender Gap Disappears In Competitions That Aren't Sudden Death

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the gender gap in math skills tests disappeared for the first time in history.  But a new paper says the issue might never have been there if the format for math competitions was different- rather than one-shot events, swit ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2013 - 3:30pm

Circles Stuck in a Triangle

I would like to start a new column of mathematical puzzles. Scientific American has one; New Scientist has one; so I hope Science 2.0 will be happy to host one! Preamble over, here's your "started for 10". The diagram shows five circles, eac ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 10 2013 - 11:42pm

Math Puzzle Column On Science 2.0

Richard Mankiewicz, our man in Bangkok, also known as Red Man (see his profile – no no, not because of Bangkok ’s red light district- that would be Stickman, not Red Man!) has started a Math Puzzle Column on Science2.0, first entry: Circles Stuck in a Tri ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Sep 19 2013 - 6:49am

Toward More Accurate Greenhouse Gas Predictions

The timber industry, including pulp and paper producers, are among Canada's most important industries  - but they are also one of the largest producers of wastewater and greenhouse gas emissions in wastewater is a concern.  Until now, greenhouse gas ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 5 2013 - 1:40pm

The Math Of Maple Syrup

If you are in the northern parts of the US (and lots of Canada) you will soon have sap running- and that means maple syrup. You probably don't think about the physiological aspects of syrup production- nor should you, that is why you have Science 2.0 ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 7 2013 - 11:41am

Solution to Five Circles Stuck in a Triangle

The " Circles Stuck in a Triangle " problem I posted last week had a rather surprising solution to it. So much so that I had to rewrite the question so that text and diagrams made sense! So here is a complete solution to what ended up being two p ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 10 2013 - 11:34pm

The Math-e-Monday Puzzle: Peculiar Periodic Numbers

Let N be a non-zero natural number composed of n digits. Let us then both prepend and append the number 4 to create two new numbers, 4N and N4, that are both (n+1) digits long. For example, if N is 123, then we create two numbers: 4123 and 1234. The questi ...

Blog Post - Richard Mankiewicz - Mar 11 2013 - 8:09am

The Math-e-Monday Puzzle: Weird Dice

Alice wants to play a game with Bill. She has just bought some new and rather strange dice. The average of each die is 3.5, just like a normal playing die, but the numbers on each face have an unfamiliar distribution. Die P has the numbers 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6 ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Apr 9 2013 - 9:56am