Mathematics

If you're trying to pick winners for this year's NCAA basketball tournament, ignore a team's seeding, which is statistically insignificant after the Sweet Sixteen, a new Journal of Gambling Business and Economics study reports. The paper suggests that picking the higher-seeded team to beat a lower-seeded opponent usually works only in the first three rounds of the tournament. Once the tournament enters the Elite Eight round, a team's seed in the tournament is irrelevant. "In the Sweet Sixteen round, the rankings still hold – but just barely," said Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer…

The International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture (ISAMA) has published HYPERSEEING regularly since fall 2006. HYPERSEEING offers a lively mix of articles, news, reviews of books and exhibits, announcements, and even cartoons. One issue per year is typically the Proceedings of the ISAMA conference. I was involved with ISAMA a few years ago and attended one of their conferences in Albany, NY. It is a mixture of art based on mathematics as well as a mathematical analysis of patterns and structures in art and architecture.

On 31 December 2009, Fabrice Bellard announced that he had set a new world record for the most number of digits of the number pi. His algorithm has calculated the first 2.7 trillion digits of this famous mathematical constant, beating the previous record of 2.5 trillion digits set earlier in the year. Bellard achieved this with just a humble home computer. Well, a rather turbo-charged home PC, if truth be told:"My computation used a single Core i7 Quad Core CPU at 2.93 GHz giving a peak processing power of 46.9 Gflops. So the supercomputer [used in the previous record] is about 2000 times…

Spring training is just getting underway for Major League Baseball, and that means it's time for Bruce Bukiet, associate professor of Mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, to make his annual predictions about the outcome of the season. Bukiet bases his predictions on a mathematical model he developed in 2000. His model computes the probability of a team winning a game against another team with given hitters, bench, starting pitcher, relievers and home field advantage. For this season, he incorporated a more realistic runner advancement model into the algorithm. Operations…

March 14th is Pi Day, and that's official! This tradition was started at the Exploratorium, in San Francisco, and 2010 will be their 22nd year of irrational exuberance. It also coincides with Einstein's date of birth – which was on 14 March 1879 – so it's a double celebration for geeks around the world. But hold on, why March 14th? Well, the people at the Exploratorium obviously figured out that written out as numbers this date becomes 3-14, which are the first three digits in the decimal expansion of pi (3.14...) However, they are lucky to be Americans because this makes no sense whatsoever…

John Timmer comments on the problem of modern biomedical research and statistics: we can now measure so much more than our statistics can handle. In a typical genome-wide association study, you're testing so many hypotheses that the favored 0.05, 0.01, and 0.001 p-values from Stats 101 just don't cut it anymore. "We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong:" The problem now is that we're rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of…

I was off to a very important discussion on the next day. As usual, there were butterflies in my stomach wondering on how my story would be accepted by my critics, my dearest students. Ever since I knew me, I have always been cutting loose from the real me due to my ever ambitious propelling desire to dig deep and crack the code. I made sure to take a deep breath just after my much needed association with the nature!   It was a full packed house as usual and some of them appeared to me as though they have not been able to come out of my 1+1 (reference: my previous blog) shock and I knew…

It was a usual practise for me to ask my young and energetic audience, my students, about what they thought about a particular topic before I share my thoughts. Once the fact is revealed, both sides of the stage remain in satisfaction equillibrium which, seemed to me, set up the required chemistry for a successful knowledge transfer. As an interesting inquisition, I wanted to know what they thought on why is 1+1 = 2 and not some other number. For a moment, there was a long silence. People looked at me as if I had gone nuts and probably I had a…

It was a usual practise for me to ask my young and energetic audience, my students, about what they thought about a particular topic before I share my thoughts. Once the fact is revealed, both sides of the stage remain in satisfaction equillibrium which, seemed to me, set up the required chemistry for a successful knowledge transfer. As an interesting inquisition, I wanted to know what they thought on why is 1+1 = 2 and not some other number. For a moment, there was a long silent. People looked at me as if I had gone nuts and probably I had a…

Some years ago, I was watching a wildlife TV programme, where a mother leopard was leading her three cubs, and they encountered a bank. Two of the cubs jumped it on the first go, but the third struggled until it found a piece of overhanging vegetation which enabled it to take the bank in two leaps. When one leaves school and enters university, one can find that leaps are required which can overtax the brain. I am always pleased to find books in maths and the sciences which allow one to make these leaps. In Mathematician’s Delight (Pelican 1943), W. W. Sawyer wrote: Too often, boys at school…