Mathematics

Today I have a decision problem for you. Alice offers Bob participation in a simple coin toss game. It's called triple or bust. Alice start the game by writing an IOU to Bob for an amount of $ 1.00. Alice then makes at least six subsequent tosses with a fair coin. On each 'heads' Alice triples the IOU amount. On 'tails' she sets the IOU to zero. How much should Bob be prepared to pay Alice to participate in  this game, knowing that he can repeat this game as often as he likes? Okay, let's see: on each coin toss there is a 50:50 chance for tripling and for voiding the IOU. So on…

Today I have a decision problem for you. Alice offers Bob participation in a simple coin toss game. It's called triple or bust. Alice start the game by writing an IOU to Bob for an amount of $ 1.00. Alice then makes at least six subsequent tosses with a fair coin. On each 'heads' Alice triples the IOU amount. On 'tails' she sets the IOU to zero. How much should Bob be prepared to pay Alice to participate in  this game, knowing that he can repeat this game as often as he likes? Okay, let's see: on each coin toss there is a 50:50 chance for tripling and for voiding the IOU. So on…

Lovely Lisa Long Leg and Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi once again visit the Stupid Donald Trump Follower’s office in the mathematics department: Lovely Liberal Lisa: Heil Trump! Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Well, that’s better than what we had before, but I am still not convinced such does anybody any favors. Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Hey, you will like this – something entirely different right up your creek. We were drunk on the beach and I started to doodle swastikas in the sand and suddenly we were wondering how a three dimensional swastika would look like. Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Oh…

Two days ago, before returning from Israel, my fiancee Kalliopi and I had a very nice dinner in a kosher restaurant near Rehovot in the company of Eilam Gross, Zohar Komargodski, and Zohar's wife Olga. The name of Eilam should be familiar to regulars of this blog as he wrote a couple of guest posts here, in similar occasions (in the first case it was a few before the Higgs discovery was announced, when the signal was intriguing but not yet decisive; and in the second case it was about the 750 GeV resonance, which unfortunately did not concretize into a discovery). As for Zohar, he is a…

A false history of science was used to initiate colonial education, in support of colonialism. This false history persists. In a recent article about decolonizing mathematics, for instance, Professor Karen Brodie asserts that, “Much, though certainly not all, of mathematics was created by dead white men.” This is not true. A false history Consider the most elementary mathematics of fractions. Did the white man invent it? No. The Rhind papyrus shows that black Egyptians knew about fractions from at least 3,700 years ago. Moreover, Greeks and Romans did not: there is no systematic way to…

During the Pamplona, Spain, "Running of the Bulls" you won't need all of the ambulances that are placed along the route, so how do event organizers know where they should be? Statistics helps know.  Experts have studied the bull runs of the last six years (a total of 48 races) in order to identify the risks that exist. As you might anticipate, absent an extraordinary event, like a terrorist attack or alien invasion, the risk to one set, the runners and the bulls, are the bulls themselves, the runners and the route. Runners may incur slight injuries such a falls, scratches or breakages,…

UK bookmakers will undoubtedly benefit from three of the home nations (England, Northern Ireland and Wales) making it to the Euro 2016 finals. But if you want to bet with your head, rather than your heart, where should you put your money? You might be surprised that there is sometimes a way that you can bet and be guaranteed to win. If you can find the right set of odds and put the right amount of money on each outcome, you will win back more than the total amount you bet, no matter what happens. For example, with the following odds, if you bet a total of £73 across the different teams left…

Sometimes we all just want to take a day off, be it from work or school. In the classic 1980s movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, the title character spent his day off gallivanting around Chicago, seeing the sights and even hijacking a parade. Unlike the super-confident Ferris, most of us would probably worry about getting caught if we took off like that. But is that fear really justified? We can use a neat mathematical tool known as the “random walk” to answer this question by modeling a day off in a city. This simple but extremely powerful…

The 'maths gender gap' was eliminated in the United States during the Bush administration under the No Child Left Behind program, and it has closed substantially in European countries and parts of Asia as well. Where do young women still lag in math? In societies with poor rates of gender equality, according to the American Economic Review. The authors highlight that even Turkey, the only secular Muslim country, lags in math scores. Not being forced to wear a head scarf does not make women equal, and Turkey scores just 0.58  on the Gender Gap Index (GGI), an equality scale used by…

After being one of the few who picked the Mets to make it to the postseason in 2015, NJIT Mathematical Sciences Professor and Associate Dean Bruce Bukiet has published his projections of how the standings should look at the end of Major League Baseball's 2016 season. And things look good for the Mets again. His Bayesian analysis predicts they will win 98 games, the most in baseball, followed by the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers with 97 wins. By winning 90 games to top the AL West, the Houston Astros will win a division title for the first time since 2001, when they were in the…