As summer reaches its midpoint, we come to the end of another rousing year of World Cup soccer. As with any international sporting event, fans all over the world have undoubtedly had their share of ups and downs. Of all the countries in this year’s tournament, however, I think Germany may be receiving the most attention, . . . → Read More: Let’s Make a Deal with Paul the Octopus
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Every now and then an article pops up which highlights a link between mathematics and the animal kingdom, and I’ve been able to discuss several such links on this blog. The latest entry into this category concerns the movement of sharks (and other ocean creatures) as they hunt for food. A recent article in Nature has . . . → Read More: Deep Sea Math Hunting Over the past few months there have been several studies aimed at understanding the mathematical sophistication of some of our friends in the animal kingdom. This is a topic I have discussed before, but these new findings are interesting and worth mentioning. In the continuing saga of animals that are better than you at math, it now appears that ants are much better than most of us at optimization. Granted, they may not be able to think abstractly, but in concrete terms, they far surpass us with a particular type of optimization: the efficiency of traffic flow. As . . . → Read More: Math Gets Around: The Entomology of Civil Engineering I missed the memo on this one, but apparently worms aren’t the only animals capable of doing math. A recent experiment coming out of the University of Tokyo suggests that Asian elephants have an unexpected aptitude for arithmetic. While many animals have a rudimentary counting ability, and are able to distinguish between sets with . . . → Read More: Math in the News: Elephants are Smarter than your Babies Those of you itching for some news last weekend may have noticed the following article, which was briefly featured on the front page of Yahoo News. In short, the article discusses the results of an experiment on the brains of roundworms. The experiment indicates that roundworms can mentally compute changes in salt levels with . . . → Read More: Math in the News: Worms Love Calculus? |
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