Mathematics

Is stupidity rising? Are we witnessing an alarming proliferation of irrationality and an exuberance of ignorance?  Stupidity seems a concern to a growing group of scholars. Last month alone two arXiv papers (here and here) appeared that both refer to a 35 year old essay by the Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla entitled "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity". In this humorous yet thought-provocative treatise Cipolla warns against the power of stupidity. Three of Cipolla laws of stupidity I reproduce here. The first provides a definition for stupidity, and the latter two…

A new bill, sponsored by Alabama Congresswoman Martha Roby, is going up before Congress - HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, which declares the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. Here's a blurb from the article: "That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of…

This is a very short note, just to help me get a feel for how this editor works. What's so spooky about action at a distance? Entanglement of separated electrons seems no more odd to me than a parameterized hyperboloid of two sheets  .  Change the parameter and the curvature and other properties change identically in the two sheets.  It may look like two things, but it acts like one thing because it is. The parameter is a property of the object, a property of both "pieces" and the fact that the curvature, which depends on the nature of the object, is identical for both…

If you want to win the NCAA College Basketball Tournament office pool and know nothing about basketball, the good news is you have just as much chance as devoted college basketball fans unless you get all crazy about it.    One solution is to try and play it safe by picking all the top seeds in the brackets to make it to the Final Four and then using a back-azimuth strategy to determine the winners among the early games.   But upsets are almost a guarantee in the NCAA Tournament.   So what is the optimum strategy for people without a clue? If you know nothing, says an…

Comparing athletes across generations is always difficult - in football, for example, players are bigger and stronger but before the hashmark changes of the early 1970s, when the field truly had a strong and weak side, a running back like Gale Sayers could make opposing defenses look silly despite an ability to break through a nose tackle. Tennis is even more difficult because the actual equipment has changed so much - there is no real way to compare players using a racket of the last 25 years with 50 years ago, no differently than comparing baseball players of today to those of the 'dead…

How does something made of loose particles sometimes behave like a solid, liquid or gas? For example, dry sand acts like a solid when you stand on it but like a liquid when you try to scoop some up in your hand. Or how Saturn's rings act like a fluid.    Dr Nikolai Brilliantov from the University of Leicester Department of Mathematics is intrigued by the maths of things like that and is going to give a free lecture on February 15th in the University’s Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 1, at 5.30pm titled ‘Statistical mechanics of granular matter: simple concepts and complex…

Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago.   Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City, started finalizing  work on something he had begun when he was much younger.   It was Strat-O-Matic Baseball. Rickman told USA Today's Mike James that as a young boy he rolled dice 5,000 times to make a table of probabilities and looked at baseball statistics in the newspaper to match probability to performance and see what would happen.   In 1961 he started producing the game and…

In optimization problems, we often encounter second-order equations in which we need to solve for unknowns in order to determine suitable values that are economical for designs as in engineering, and in business and economics for profit maximization. In this paper, a technique referred to as solutions of the second order equations by determinant, which may be used to solve such an equation or equations reducible to second order equations, is offered. An application program, written to implement the algorithm for a given second order equation, which can be generalized, is presented.  …

For hundreds of years, mathematicians even as great as Leonhard Euler(1) have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting.  Progress has been made but there has never been a full theory to explain partitions.   Answers have always led to more questions.Basically, partitions are not considered by some to be part of number theory at all but to keep it simple for now, in number theory, a partition of a positive integer (n) is a way of writing n as a sum of positive integers.     Here is an example from the Classic Encyclopedia: To form the…

Was the fall of the Roman Empire or, as often predicted, the coming fall of the American Empire, numerically predictable? It is, according to research led by Sergey Gavrilets, associate director for scientific activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and a professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville published in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. Yes, that's a journal dedicated to theoretical history and mathematics, though obviously on a science site we will note they are using theoretical colloquially and mean…