Mathematics

Personalized Drug Testing, Thanks To Your Heart On A Chip

What did USC biomedical engineering assistant professor Megan McCain think when she first saw a real human heart, with all of those thin valves that have to open and close every second of our lives? “Wow, there’s a lot of plaques of fat. I need to stop eat ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 10 2014 - 9:00am

An Algorithm To Explain Sex

What do you get when you mix theorists in computer science with evolutionary biologists? You get an algorithm to explain sex. A fascinating mystery of evolution is how sexual recombination and natural selection produced the teeming diversity of life that ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 16 2014 - 3:05pm

Maths From An Extra Terrestrial Civilization- What Could It Be Like- And Would We Understand It?

It's often said that if we do make contact with Extra Terrestrials (ETs), e.g. detect a radio transmission from a distant galaxy through SETI, that maths would be one of the few things we would have in common with them. But- how similar would their m ...

Article - Robert Walker - Nov 16 2015 - 9:27am

The Math Of Cancer: Traveling Waves Model Tumor Invasion

Cell migration, which is involved in wound healing, cancer and tumor growth, and embryonic growth and development, has been a topic of interest to mathematicians and biologists for decades.  ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 25 2014 - 8:30pm

Can You Do Square Roots By Heart?

When I was five years old I used to be sort of an attraction to relatives. One of my mother's brothers is an engineer, and he was amazed by my ability to do complex calculations by heart. But to me it was only amusing to observe their amazement for wh ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 26 2014 - 2:26pm

Jacobi Iterative Method: 19th Century Math Gets A 21st Century Makeover

The Jacobi iterative method, a 169-year-old math strategy, may soon get a new lease on life. ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2014 - 2:11pm

An Internet of Smells, Sounds, and Sensations

Reading Robert Walker's article on what extraterrestrial mathematics might look like has the wheels in my head a'turning.  We live in a digital civilization, one that specifically evolved toward a binary representation of a decimal-based mathemat ...

Blog Post - Michael Martinez - Jul 2 2014 - 6:35pm

Science 2.0: How The Math Of 10 Million Data Points Per Day Can Help

They're data mining our children, notes Politico writer Stephanie Simon. She is talking about education technology startup Knewton and their use of data analytics to find out how kids think. They want to be able to predict who will struggle with fract ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Jul 4 2014 - 10:47am

Platonic Solids Generate 4-Dimensional Analogs

Platonic solids are regular bodies in three dimensions, such as the cube and icosahedron, and have been known for millennia. They feature prominently in the natural world wherever geometry and symmetry are important, for instance in lattices and quasi-cry ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2014 - 9:44am

Kadison-Singer Math Solution May Mean A Boost For Science 2.0

Dan Spielman, a Yale computer scientist, wanted to model complex online communities like Facebook, hoping to gain insight into how they form and interact. That's one of the precepts of Science 2.0, understanding how people can participate and scientis ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 12 2014 - 7:19pm