Mathematics

Game Theory May Predict How To Reduce Panic Buying

During difficult times, we hope that everyone will pull together, keep calm, and work as a unit to ensure that society continues to run smoothly. Unfortunately, this is not always the case – as is particularly evident right now. ...

Article - The Conversation - Apr 5 2020 - 12:06pm

Asymptomatic Worries: Sample Pooling Used In Blood Banking Will Boost Coronavirus Testing Capacity

Early on in this year's coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, experts began to explore whether the pool testing approach used in blood banking could be adapted to increase testing capacity in coronavirus diagnostics and protect those with a high mortalit ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 29 2020 - 10:17am

Should Any Current COVID-19 Estimates Be Used To Make Policy Decisions?

There is a popular saying in statistics- "Everyone believes the data except the collector. No one believes the model except the modeler." ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 8 2020 - 5:35pm

Modeling Chaos: How To Anticipate Riot Dynamics And Social Unrest

Is it possible to predict nonlinear behavior, such as when a protest will become a riot? Perhaps, though parameters bring special challenges. We've seen the weaknesses of numerical modeling when it comes to disease epidemiology, and many of those conc ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 22 2020 - 10:59am

Genomic Selection And Economics: A Model To Predict The Best Crop

A new mathematical model seeks to predict economic performance of crops, which will allow breeders to obtain the plants with the highest possible quality.  Using even the most advanced legacy tools, it is very difficult to create a new variety of plants a ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 21 2020 - 9:17am

Poll Averaging Was No More Accurate In 2012 Than It Is Now

In 2012, the enthusiasm for poll averaging reached a fever pitch. Very few people were critical of it and instead talked about how science had taken over predictive politics. (1) I was critical of the accuracy and swam against the tide of those in media gu ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Nov 5 2020 - 12:27pm

It's Time To Stop Pretending Polls Are Scientific

If there is one lesson that political experts may have finally gotten in 2020, it's that polls are shockingly inaccurate. ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Nov 5 2020 - 12:52pm

The Mathematics Of Cancer

In our daily life, we unfortunately have become used to seeing images of tumors and melanomas. You may have noticed that they’re are not entirely symmetric. This asymmetry is useful to doctors in their diagnoses, but why are they asymmetric? ...

Article - The Conversation - Dec 9 2020 - 5:01am

Model That Claimed Only Lockdown Works To Prevent Coronavirus Spread Was Flawed, Shows New Look

If you believe the Chinese government, they've had basically no meaningful COVID-19 deaths since March. I'd also like to sell you a wet market in Wuhan. Believing a dictatorship that has routinely lied has been disastrous. It was disastrous for t ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jan 4 2021 - 4:17pm

Imaginarity: New Paper Says The Imaginary Part Of Quantum Mechanics Can Be Observed

Mathematics is a language and languages can be used to create stories. It just takes imagination to create time travel or wormholes or theories of strings or lots of nice things theoretical physicists throw into arXiv. Sometimes math has to create a story ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Apr 2 2021 - 12:42am