Mathematics

The timber industry, including pulp and paper producers, are among Canada's most important industries  - but they are also one of the largest producers of wastewater and greenhouse gas emissions in wastewater is a concern.  Until now, greenhouse gas emission estimates have been limited by the mathematical models used to predict them. Researchers have recently developed a new dynamic method to better predict the emission content of these gases.    "Currently used steady-state models are able to give an overall prediction but dynamic models can estimate the variation in…

Richard Mankiewicz, our man in Bangkok, also known as Red Man (see his profile – no no, not because of Bangkok’s red light district - that would be Stickman, not Red Man!) has started a Math Puzzle Column on Science2.0, first entry: Circles Stuck in a Triangle. Richard has another webpage where he proved to be able to come up with a lot more puzzles, so if we encourage him, he may well do a darn good job here, too - so go there and encourage him. He asks … , well go over there and have a look already.  Here is my solution, but I only tell you hints about how to get it: Consider that the…

I would like to start a new column of mathematical puzzles. Scientific American has one; New Scientist has one; so I hope Science 2.0 will be happy to host one! Preamble over, here's your "started for 10". The diagram shows five circles, each with integer radius, all touching the base of the large triangle. The four smaller circles all touch their two neighbouring circles, with the large circle touching all four. The two sides of the triangle each touch two of the circles. Let the radii of the circles be a, b and c, such that a > b > c. Given that c has a length of 4 units, find the…

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the gender gap in math skills tests disappeared for the first time in history.  But a new paper says the issue might never have been there if the format for math competitions was different - rather than one-shot events, switch to rounds. Twenty-four local elementary schools in a  Journal of Economic Behavior&Organization article changed the math format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest. In the contest, students were paired against a classmate…

It is somewhat surreal to see the discovery of the largest prime number paraded on prime time broadcast media. Mathematicians around the world are asked to explain the significance of this discovery in layman’s terms, which is up there with physicists trying to explain what the Large Hadron Collider actually does. Below you’ll see a pretty sparky Sky News interview by Eugenia Cheng, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Just notice at the very end how jolly pleased with themselves the newscasters seem to be. The new record was discovered by Dr Curtis Cooper at the University of…

How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a disease will spread and a new model seeks to lay the foundation for new zoonotic disease spread thinking By outlining a predictive model of a spatial epidemic spread in a population of territorial animals and quantifying the instances of transmission events, the research team determined the propagation speed of a pathogen using parameters based on the knowledge of the demography of a species, the way animals wander and the degree of contagiousness of the…

A new paper outlines the many pitfalls associated with simulation methods such as Monte Carlo algorithms and other commonly used molecular dynamics approaches. The context of this paper is the exponential development of computing power in the past 60 years, estimated to have increased by a factor of 1015, in line with Moore's law., and the ability to try and simulate new things without understand models. Today, short simulations can reproduce a system the size of a bacterium. But there are many examples of issues arising when seemingly simple simulation methods are not applied with the…

Mathematicians have shown how to use an algorithm for analyzing void space in sphere packing where the spheres need not all be the same size.  This method could be applied to analyze the geometry of liquids present between multi-sized spheres that are akin to a model for porous material. This provides a tool for studying the flow of such fluids through porous material. More importantly, it can also be used to study the packing geometry of proteins. There have been several previous attempts to calculate the volume and the surface area of packing of spheres. But few methods have taken into…

The “coffee-ring effect” is a commonplace occurrence that happens when drops of liquid with suspended particles dry, leaving a ring-shaped stain at the drop’s edges. How those particles stack up as they reach the drop’s edge, and how different particles make smoother or rougher deposition profiles at the drop edge depending on their shape, is the subject of a new study from Penn and the growth profiles they found offer tests of deep mathematical ideas about growing interfaces. In the coffee-ring effect, drop edges are “pinned” to a surface, meaning that when the liquid evaporates, the drop…

It's easy to blame weather forecasting when the forecast says one thing and ends up being another, but Brigham Young University mechanical engineering professor Julie Crockett says it may not be the fault of the meteorologists.  According to Crockett, forecasters make mistakes because the models they use for predicting weather can't accurately track highly influential elements called internal waves. Atmospheric internal waves are waves that propagate between layers of low-density and high-density air. Although hard to describe, almost everyone has seen or felt these waves. Cloud patterns…