Mathematics

Icon for Cosmic Embryo: Erupting star V838 Monocerotis  ”On 2010-09-26, at 5:01 AM, Frithjof A.S. Sterrenburg wrote: Dear Richard! Sorry to hear you have been in the claws of the barber-surgeons.  Hope everything is well now!… As for your itinerant existence, you begin to resemble the mathematician Erdös! Cheers, boy, get well soon!" My Erdös Number is 2i where i is the imaginary number: √-1. This is because I post-doc'ed with Stanislaw Ulam 1967-68, who published with Paul Erdös (Erdös&Ulam, 1968), but I didn’t see eye to eye with Ulam at all, and thus published…

Some detractors believe science is an 'old boys network' resistant to outsiders - if that were true, a group of young boys and girls wouldn't have their first journal publication.  At age eight. Biology Letters has a study conducted by an English elementary school (Devon) and the young investigators  examined the way bees see colors and patterns (buff-tailed bumble-bee - Bombus terrestris).  Their lab?  A local churchyard. Using the scientific method and time-honored experimental procedures, they "provide convincing evidence that bees can transpose between learned colour,…

It's worth dusting this off: a simple, accurate equation that decides to the penny how much you should spend on anyone's gift this holiday season. Get cracking you slacker. I wrote this for the Science Channel, but basically it's a framework that allows you to split any defined, limited resource according to your priorities. Actually, a friend of mine runs the Cornell Outdoor Education program and after seeing the Science Channel bit, emailed to say he'd used the same strategy to split the yearly operating budget. (Independent of my equation—actually, the dude's a genius. Much, much smarter…

First, I'm afraid I fell victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get in involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this: probability is not additive (as a couple astute Times readers have now pointed out--before going further, you might want to read my Frankie the Fixer puzzle in the left sidebar of THIS PAGE). For example, if you have a 4-sided die, there's a 1/4 chance of rolling a specific number first try. If you roll again, is there a 2/4 chance, and after five rolls a 5/4 chance? Nope. Instead the math goes like this: • one roll…

Equations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond. But what about relating speed and MESS? Simply, how fast should you expect a clean kids' room to get messy? Friends Jonathan Liu and John Booth brought me the question and did the better part of the brainstorming and I did the factor slapping, to produce the collaborative equation below. Plug in your family's numbers to discover how many square feet per hour your kid's room will accumulate non-traversable junk. For the über geeks out there, keep reading below the equation for more mathematical sweetness you can do with the Speed…

1,400,000 70-dimension histogram vectors about gamer behavior.  What can you do with that? Me?  Nothing, the math is too much but, if you can make sense of it, a lot of data is there in the ongoing online gaming phenomenon known as World of Warcraft(WoW).   Keeping track of all that data would seem to be solely the purview of computer programmers but sociologists are starting to take notice.   Some people are just goofing off and writing a book about their experiences but others see gold in 'game mining' - the insights of anthropology we can get by seeing what 10 million…

Here we have two words, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, which scholars of those languages will have no difficulty in recognizing as descending from the same ancient Semitic source. In Arabic the word means “error” in the sense of “error message” from a computer. The Arabic version is pronounced “khata” (with an emphatic “t”), and the Hebrew is quite similar. I’m sticking with the Arabic for now, because this is the jumping-off point for an interesting bit of medieval mathematical history. The word “algebra” comes to us from the seminal work of Al-Khwarizmi (c.780 – c.850), who first gave the…

Want a real Halloween nightmare? Imagine filling your child's  too-small bucket in the first three houses and going home with only a  small slice of your kid's potential rake. But if you allow your little monster (or in my case, blue whale with pink and purple barnacles), to carry a big bag, you should be prepared to spend the hours and hours (and hours) needed to fill it. Bad news: there are nightmares on both  ends of the bag guesstimation spectrum. So instead of playing the equivalent of Russian roulette with your child's Halloween bag size, use the equation below to…

It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th. Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical analysis because virtually everything except defense is rigorously quantifiable.   There are some details, such as an umpire who might call a wider strike zone than another, but at least from a rules perspective the strike zone is what it is.  Numerical models have long been used to analyze the past and therefore make educated predictions about the future performance of players - a player can…

President Obama's director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, made no friends among women when, as president of Harvard, he tried to have a discourse about gender differences in the higher levels of math-intensive fields.    He quickly learned that speculation and conjecture are best left to philosophy undergraduate classes and actual women in academia don't much care what he thinks about their abilities. 'Girls can't do math' quickly became associated with his name but he managed to resurrect his standing nicely by becoming part of the Obama camp - however,…