If you are going to use 'entanglement' to teleport quantum information on a practical scale, it needs to be worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these…

Regulars to this blog know I am partial to game theory. The very idea that mathematical reasoning can teach us a thing or two about the strategies we deploy in social interactions, is most intriguing…

It's statistical polling...for science.  A paper in Nature Climate Change uses structured expert elicitation and mathematically pools experts' opinions to forecast future sea level rises from…

Why do people skip the queue, obstruct, cause traffic jams, and create delays for everyone? Who are these anonymous creatures lacking cooperation skills? And more importantly: are you sure others don…

2013 will be the year of Mathematics of Planet Earth. This global initiative was spearheaded by Professor Christiane Rousseau of the University of Montreal, and it was fitting that the first national…

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician known for intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without using proofs or modern mathematical tools. Instead, the devout…

In the history of statistics, economy and decision theory, the St. Petersburg paradox plays a key role. This lottery problem goes back a full three centuries to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli…

We all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments. If…

The most startling thing to me about the election of 2012 was how spookily accurate polls were.  Social scientists in one camp want to dismiss determinism while the other camp has biology-envy…

Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008.  So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75%…