This morning my good friend Gabe of Motivated Grammar, who is secretly addicted to celebrity gossip, sent me this link to an article from Perez Hilton which is all about mathematics. No, I am not joking – Mr. Hilton apparently loves Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who solved the famous Poincaré conjecture and recently refused a $1 . . . → Read More: Math Really Goes Pop
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Last year, Professor Steven Strogatz of Cornell University wrote a series of op-eds for the New York Times that discussed the presence of mathematics in unlikely places. I discussed one of these columns here. Now, either those articles were well-received, or Professor Strogatz is well-connected, because this year he’s back in the Times with a . . . → Read More: Math in the News(paper) Some time ago, I wrote an article on the optimal way to select a mate, assuming you know how many eligible partners exist, and that once you’ve dated someone, you can’t go back and date them again (sorry, Drew Barrymore and that dude from the Apple commercials). This is less romantically known as the secretary problem. . . . → Read More: Finding Love with a Modified Drake’s Equation Late last year, a study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which tried to pin down origins for the gender gap in mathematics education. As I’ve discussed before, the gender gap in math education is shrinking, and has been shown to be less about biology and more about culture – in cultures . . . → Read More: Gender Gap Genesis In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, some of you fans may be dreading the next six months. To kick off this football drought, I’d like to highlight this article, which was featured on Yahoo yesterday. The article says that Saints quarterback Drew Brees should hope to lose the coin toss at the start of the . . . → Read More: Lying with Statistics in Football Big ups to Liz Landau for bringing attention to one of the most important unsolved math problems of our time, the Riemann Hypothesis. Over at the CNN SciTechBlog, she has written a nice article on the problem aimed at a general audience. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Riemann’s manuscript, where he . . . → Read More: Happy Birthday, Riemann Hypothesis! Last month marked the release of Superfreakonomics, a sequel by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner to the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics. The fanfare surrounding this prefix-enhanced release has been marred, however, by controversy surrounding a chapter on global warming. Starting with this entry on ClimateProgress.org, the debate has drawn a few responses on the . . . → Read More: Debating Superfreakonomics As you may have heard, last week Martin Gardner celebrated his 95th birthday. Gardner, who authored the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American for a quarter of a century, is often credited for introducing generations of young students to the beauty and charm inherent in mathematics. My favorite quote in this vein comes from . . . → Read More: Martin Gardner and the Three Way Duel I’m not sure, but this seems like a good candidate for a new bar. According to a recent study out of the University of Washington, as many as half of the population may fail to understand simple probability statements, in the context of weather forecasts. Here’s the summary: If, for example, a forecast calls for a 20 . . . → Read More: How Low Can We Go? For those who don’t believe we can actually use math to fight crime, the story of Harry Markopolos, the man who blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff, shows that a dream of using math to catch criminals need not be untenable. In a recent interview for 60 Minutes, Mr. Markopolos describes how he harnessed the . . . → Read More: Numb3rs in Real Life |
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