Mathematics

It might be hard for the young student to see the fun in math. Up till now it has been memorize, memorize, memorize for them. This can give them a break and tease their minds. Numbers that look simple, just two digits "1" and "8." It doesn’t get any easier than this, but wow can these two numbers do some magic. Consider this magic square: IXOHOXI 8818 1111 8188 1881 8181 1888 8811 1118 1811 8118 1181 8888 1188 8881 1818 8111 Just like every other magic square, this one adds up to 19998 in all the usual ways. Then things get bizarre. The title of…

The knock on publicly traded companies is that they only think short term, quarter to quarter, which reduces or delays investments in risky, long term innovation projects in order to boost the firm’s stock price. Entrepreneurs always talk about innovation while larger companies hesitate to take chances that could hurt short term profits. But do investments in innovations hurt stock prices? Not according to Gerard J. Tellis, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and Ashish Sood, an assistant professor at the of marketing at Emory…

Be warned: this article deals primarily with shark attacks, the lottery, beer, and how to get a date using math. Is it a good decision to keep reading? Unfortunately, the answer is "you need to keep reading to find out." Sound irrational? Good—your massively irrational mind should have no problem with it, then. Consider this: every year when the Discovery Channel broadcasts "Shark Week" visits to Florida beaches decline. Presumably, the network's programming makes the waters no less safe (assuming sharks are not, in fact, empowered by cable television). However, after watching a week of…

Mathematicians and astrophysicists recently discovered that work on the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and gravitational lensing had a common answer. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (FTA), proofs of which go back to the 18th century, is a bedrock mathematical truth, elegant in its simplicity: Every complex polynomial of degree n has n roots in the complex numbers. In the 1990s, Terry Sheil-Small and Alan Wilmshurst explored the question of extending the FTA to harmonic polynomials. In a surprising twist in 2001, Khavinson, together with G. Swiatek, applied methods from complex dynamics…

The folding of paper or drops of water falling from a tap are two events which involve the creation of singularities requiring sophisticated mathematical techniques to describe, analyze and predict. Singularities occur at a point of cut off, or sudden change, within a physical system, as in formation of cracks, lightning strikes, creation of ink drops in printers, and the breaking of a cup when it drops. Improved understanding of the underlying mathematics would have many benefits, for example in making materials of all kinds that are more resistant to cracking or breaking. There is a lot in…

The nomination process for Raytheon's 2008 Math Hero Awards has now opened. These annual awards reward and celebrate teachers and tutors for promoting math achievement to students in a fun and challenging learning environment. The MathMovesU program grants $1 million annually to students, teachers and schools in scholarships, grants and awards. Based on a nomination process, math teachers and volunteers who work with students are eligible to receive a $2,500 Math Hero award, and their schools or an approved math-related nonprofit organization of their choice receive a $2,500 matching grant…

In a paper recently published in Cortex, Jan Lonnemann (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and colleagues report that many children at the age of 8-9 years seem to represent numbers spatially. Interestingly, boys using this kind of representation tended to have better calculation abilities, while girls who represent numbers spatially tended to show poorer calculation abilities. The authors assume that these differences may be due to gender-specific thinking styles: for boys, who may prefer visual-spatial thinking styles, it seems to be helpful to represent numbers spatially when being…

The connection between music and mathematics has been widely known for centuries. Musica Universalis, "music of the spheres", emerged in the Middle Ages as the idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies -- the sun, moon and planets -- could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious, and more than 200 years ago Pythagoras discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios. Three music professors, Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University,…

The risk of illegal information access, notably in money transactions, requires more and more advanced cryptographic techniques against criminals and the occasional mischevious teenager. Quantum cryptography has been regarded as 100-percent protection against attacks on sensitive data traffic but a research team at Linköping University in Sweden has found a hole in even this advanced technology. When an encrypted message needs to be sent over a computer network, the most difficult problem is how the key should be transmitted. One way is to literally send it by courier (which has its own…

Infinity was invented to account for the possibility that in a never-ending universe, anything can happen. Life on other Earth-like planets, for example, is possible in an infinite universe, but not probable, according to a scientist from the University of East Anglia. The mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low because of the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of the Earth. Structurally complex and intelligent life evolved late on Earth and this process…