Mathematics

Try to remember a phone number, and you're using what's called your sequential memory. This kind of memory, in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas, underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings.  "In our life, all of our behaviors and our process of thinking is sequential in time," said Mikhail Rabinovich, a physicist and neurocognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego. To understand how sequential memory works, researchers like Rabinovich have built mathematical models that mimic this process. In particular, he and…

You might call it a two-tone football.  If you're a real mathematician you may be able to explain to me what the real name of the thing is.  I'm not a real mathematician but I occasionally wrangle with math problems as visualized surfaces in my head.  It's like speaking in metaphor without knowing where the metaphors came from or what they mean.  I have a thin grasp of what an Euler Spiral is and I sort of understand that the surface of an American-style football is a Prolate Spheroid.  Put those two concepts together and you come up with the Yin and Yang of the…

By Michael Greshko, Inside Science – Mathematics that can describe coffeepots, forest fires and flu outbreaks may also underpin the brain’s response to anesthesia, a new study suggests. The mathematical model of the brain, published in Physical Review Letters, marks the latest attempt to simulate the surprisingly complicated effects of general anesthetics across the brain. Despite modern medicine’s 160-year use of ether, laughing gas and propofol in surgery, researchers still don’t know how exactly they tamp down the back-and-forth between the thalamus – the brain’s hub for sensory…

Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published psychology studies; though they were able to successfully repeat the original experiments in most all cases, they were able to reproduce the original results in less than half, they report. The authors - part of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, and led by Brian Nosek - emphasize that a failure to reproduce does not necessarily mean the original report was incorrect, but say that their results do…

Sepsis kills more Americans every year than AIDS, breast cancer and prostate cancer combined but it gets far less attention. Unlike those other diseases, hours can make the difference between life and death in sepsis. The quest for early diagnosis of this life-threatening condition is why researchers have been seeking a more effective way to spot hospital patients at risk of septic shock. A new computer-based method correctly predicts septic shock in 85 percent of cases, without increasing the false positive rate from screening methods that are common now. More than two-thirds of the time,…

Weyl points, the 3D analogues of the structures that make graphene exceptional, were theoretically predicted in 1929. Today, an international team of Physicists from MIT and Zhejiang University, found them in photonic crystals, opening a new dimension in photonics. In 1928 the English physicist Paul Dirac discovered a crucial equation in particle physics and quantum mechanics, now known as Dirac equation, which describes relativistic wave-particles. Very fast electrons were solutions to the Dirac equation. Moreover, the equation predicted the existence of anti-electrons, or positrons:…

I’ve come to believe that mathematics, as an investigative science, as a practical discipline and as a creative art, shares many characteristics with cookery. It’s not just spaghetti alla carbonara, it’s the whole business of inventing dishes and preparing them. It’s an analogy with many parts, and it has consequences. To introduce myself: I’m a professional mathematician, an amateur cook and an enthusiastic eater. The ideas in this essay are distilled from years of formal reasoning, mad culinary experiments and adventurous meals. In short, I’ve found that: I do mathematics for much the…

Comparing the genomes of different species — or different members of the same species — is the basis of a great deal of modern biology because DNA sequences conserved across species are likely to be functionally important, while variations between members of the same species can indicate different susceptibilities to disease. The basic algorithm for determining how much two sequences of symbols have in common — the “edit distance” between them — is now more than 40 years old.  Old is not always bad. People have been trying to take down Einstein forever also. And at the ACM Symposium on…

Mathematical biologist Dr. Jamie Wood wanted to know how birds collectively negotiate man-made obstacles such as wind turbines which lie in their flight paths and that led to a research project with colleagues in the Departments of Biology and Mathematics at York and scientists at the Animal and Plant Health Agency which found that the social structure of groups of migratory birds may have a significant effect on their vulnerability to avoid collisions with obstacles, particularly wind turbines. The researchers created a range of computer simulations to explore if social hierarchies are…

There are those who believed that B.B. King wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar player, including the man himself. In a recent interview he said: I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. And his musical vocabulary was limited. King once told Bono: “I’m no good with chords, so what we do is, uh, get somebody else to play chords… I’m horrible with chords”. He even claimed that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time. Speaking as someone who used…