Mathematics

Predicting The 2014 Baseball Postseason

Now that Major League Baseball’s regular season has ended with the wild wildcard win by the Kansas City Royals over the Oakland A’s and with the Pittsburgh Pirates being eliminated by the San Francisco Giants, I've once again begun analyzing the proba ...

Article - Bruce Bukiet - Oct 3 2014 - 1:40pm

Why There Are Fewer Female Economists

Economics is a dwindling field. Long called the 'dismal science' it is now considered just another philosophical school of thought; people in the money business who want quantification hire physicists rather than economists. And the lack of fema ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 28 2014 - 10:32am

Game Theory: When Are Groups Social? Or Insufferable?

Humans are primarily social creatures- Thoreau may have pretended he wanted to sit among nature by himself and write a book but he was in a house built by someone else, paid for by someone else, with clothes made by someone else, and writing a book that w ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2014 - 2:22pm

Virtual Meat: "Embedded" Emissions In Livestock Go Beyond CO2

In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then the concept of 'embedded' emissions has been us ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 14 2014 - 10:03am

Transient Dynamics- What Happens When Vaccines Aren't Perfect

Vaccines are medical technology and like all technology some of the production runs are misfires. Some shots fail due to "leakiness," lack of effectiveness on certain individuals in a population, or shorter duration of potency. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 21 2014 - 10:49am

Random Walk Is Similar In Particles, Waves...and Ants

In a famous mathematical thought experiment, the goal is to make randomness deterministic by closed-form equation, so mathematicians tried to determine the path of a 'drunken sailor' staggering around a town.  If there are street lamps, he will ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 26 2014 - 11:57am

Golden Ratio Of Space-Time?

The golden ratio is known as the divine proportion because it is found so often in nature. It has fascinated mathematicians since Euclid. A golden ratio is when the ratio of two numbers is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantit ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 28 2014 - 12:30pm

Domino's Square Pizza Or Round- Which Is The Best Value For The Money?

Kelly Abbott /Flickr, CC BY-NC By Tim Trudgian, Australian National University Consider a standard pizza box containing a standard circular pizza. How much more would you be willing to pay for a square pizza that filled the box? ...

Article - The Conversation - Nov 28 2014 - 3:02pm

Precise Digits: Does That Make Numbers More Reliable?

There is such a thing as 'too precise' when it comes to numbers. So what's appropriate? Erik Olsson, CC BY-NC-SA By Jonathan Borwein (Jon), University of Newcastle and David H. Bailey, University of California, Davis ...

Article - The Conversation - Nov 28 2014 - 7:01pm

Selfishness Pays In Real Life: Evolution Favors The Collapse Of Cooperation

In the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners kept isolated from each other are offered a deal: they can confess to a crime and if their accomplice remains silent the charges will be dropped in exchange for testimony ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 2 2014 - 9:00am