Mathematics

How geeky do you have to be to attend a mathematical meeting every 4 years - and think India in August is a cool place to do it?   Pretty geeky.   The ultimate geeks. If that is you, we know where you will be August 2010, when the largest gathering of geeks ever will happen in Hyderabad.   It's the International Congress of Mathematicians, the biggest and most prestigious international mathematical meeting, which takes place once every four years. No meeting in any scientific discipline has the kind of wide sweep that ICMs have: every branch of mathematics is covered and…

Rock-paper-scissors, RPS. Who hasn't played it as a child? The game, known by a variety of names such as Rochambeau, Jan-ken and Kauw-bauwi-bo, is played all over the world. The rules are straightforward, and can be explained to a five-year old:Both players simultaneously make one of three gestures representing rock (clenched fist), paper (open hand) or scissors (index and middle finger apart). Rock gets beaten (wrapped) by paper, paper gets cut by scissors, and scissors get smashed by rock. Identical gestures create a tie. The objective is to select a gesture that beats that of the opponent…

I'm not a Russell fan so his followers will have different opinions. One particular quirk of symbolic logic is the reason for this column. First it should be said that symbolic logic owes a great debt to Bertrand Russell for early work on that branch of mathematics. My complaint is mainly one situation that occurs when a contradiction is found in a logical sequence. The rules allow almost any type of mischief to be attached to remove the contradiction, whether the attachment has any validity or not. A link is given to a good introductory text on symbolic logic for people with little…

While going through old boxes of miscellaneous detritus, I came upon several sheets of paper from my health journalism grad school days. The scribes packed a lot of wisdom into those articles and bullet points, and I'll share various nuggets of knowledge in upcoming articles.1 One of the articles talked about framing scientific information to make it relevant to different audiences, and for some odd reason I thought of my dad and Yahtzee. My dad is crazy brilliant. It's ridiculous how smart this man is. Yet every time I came home from break in college I'd have to re-explain DNA, starting from…

Martin Gardner died yesterday. His memory will live on through some 70+ books and, above all, through his column "MATHEMATICAL GAMES" in Scientific American. During the 25 years that Gardner's column appeared, it was probably for many amongst the SciAm readers the main reason to buy a copy each month. Via "MATHEMATICAL GAMES" , Martin Gardner made the wonders of math known to the layperson. For an example see this 40 (!) year old column introducing ''The Game of Life" to the masses. Martin Gardner (Photo: Wikipedia) A compilation of blogs remembring Martin Gardner: James Randi on JREF…

The safe deposit in front of you is wide open. Twenty stacks of one-hundred dollar bills stare you in the face. Each stack a hundred bills thick. So many Benjamins. All for Jude, the other remaining contestant. That is... provided you don't touch the money. You prepared yourself a zillion times. Still it feels like you are placed in an entirely new situation, a nightmare you never considered. Luke Lucifer the game show host moves closer to you and looks deep in your eyes. His voice is soothing. “I will repeat the question once more. We have two safe deposits. Whatever is left of the 200k in…

One of the disappointments experienced by most mathematics students is that they never get a course in mathematics. They get courses in calculus, algebra, topology, and so on, but the division of labor in teaching seems to prevent these different topics from being combined into a whole. In fact, some of the most important and natural questions are stifled because they fall on the wrong side of topic boundary lines. Algebraists do not discuss the fundamental theorem of algebra because “that’s analysis” and analysts do not discuss Riemann surfaces because “that’s topology,” for example. Thus if…

As we’ve just had income tax time in the U.S., I’ve been hearing a bunch of silliness associated with it. I thought I’d talk about two of my favourite (well, for some value of “favourite”) tax fallacies. It doesn’t pay for me to get a raise! It’ll just put me in a higher tax bracket, I’ll pay more taxes, and in the end I’ll wind up making less than I did before. I haven’t worked out every possibility, and maybe there’s really a way that can happen, but I can’t imagine what it could be. The “tax brackets” in the U.S. are marginal — you only pay the higher tax on the portion of your income…

Some Notes On Data Smoothing The topic of data filtering can be pretty obscure for the general public.  Taking raw data and smoothing out the lumps can seem like deliberate falsification.  It isn't. In the early days of space exploration it was only possible to produce images of fairly low resolution.  Special techniques were used to enhance the images. In the first image, below, I have colorised a block of 9 pixels to demonstrate a simple set of image enhancement techniques.  Each pixel in an image is compared to its immediate neighbors and an operation is performed to…

In 2002 Grigori Perelman started to publish his proof of the Poincare Conjecture. Shunning peer-reviewed journals he published directly on arXiv. In 2006 he was awarded the Fields Medal for his achievement, and became the first ever mathematician to refuse the prize. Last week, the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded him the $1 million that went with cracking one of their seven Millennium Prize Problems. It looks as if he is turning his back on this too. He now lives the life of a semi-recluse and has walked away from mathematics. Back in 1982 the young Perelman won gold medal at the…