Mathematics

The way this is usually presented is - that we can simulate physics on a computer. So what is to stop us eventually simulating your whole body including your brain? And if so, is it not just a matter of time, and increasing computer power before we have exact simulations of humans as computer programs? Programs whose behaviour is indistinguishable from humans? This is a staple of many science fiction stories of course. But some logicians, philosophers and physicists think there are flaws in this argument. We know the laws of physics are incomplete. Could there be physical processes which…

The brain is based on physics, and we can simulate physics on a computer, so what is to stop us eventually simulating human beings in a computer, your whole body including your brain? Many researchers, and science fiction writers have come to the conclusion that it is just a matter of time, and increasing computer power before we can do this. However - there are some gaps in this reasoning. Are the laws of physics as we know them complete? Could there be laws physics that we can't simulate using a computer program?  Roger Penrose, a specialist in quantum gravity, thinks that our…

Humans are primarily social creatures - Thoreau may have pretended he wanted to sit among nature by himself and write a book but he was in a house built by someone else, paid for by someone else, with clothes made by someone else, and writing a book that would be published by someone else. People band together in groups to be stronger - about causes or for actual defense. How to prompt people to become social rather than anti-social is one of the central goals of game theory.  Numerical models have found  that it is almost impossible to control cooperation in large groups - aging…

Economics is a dwindling field. Long called the 'dismal science' it is now considered just another philosophical school of thought; people in the money business who want quantification hire physicists rather than economists. And the lack of female interest in the field shows it is no longer in vogue. A new analysis finds that women make up 57 percent of undergraduate classes at UK universities but only 27 percent of economics students. The women who like math are doing something else with it. 1.2 percent of females apply to study economics while 3.8 percent of boys do.   More…

Now that Major League Baseball’s regular season has ended with the wild wildcard win by the Kansas City Royals over the Oakland A’s and with the Pittsburgh Pirates being eliminated by the San Francisco Giants, I've once again begun analyzing the probability of each team advancing through each round of baseball’s postseason. The Los Angeles Dodgers (71%) and the Washington Nationals (68%) have the greatest chance of advancing to the National League Championship Series going into their first Division Series games. The Kansas City Royals (61%) and Baltimore Orioles (64%) after winning the first…

Mathematicians have introduced a new element of uncertainty into an equation used to describe the behavior of fluids, which might make it possible to better reflect the inherent uncertainties of the natural world. Math can prove almost anything. Hardly a month goes by without someone proving time travel mathematically on arXiv. Yet turbulence and nonlinear behavior are more of a struggle numerically. Just making nonlinear linear in very small steps isn't really doing much.The new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A deals with Burgers' equation, which is used to describe turbulence and…

An example of unidirectional cause and effect: bad weather means umbrella sales rise, but buying umbrellas won't make it rain. Credit: Mariusz Olszewski/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND By Jonathan Borwein (Jon), University of Newcastle and Michael Rose, University of Newcastle UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Today we look at the dangers of making a link between unrelated results. Here’s an historical tidbit you may not be aware of. Between the years 1860 and 1940, as the number of Methodist ministers living in New…

Calculating the pros and cons is a time-honored method for making analytical decisions but focusing too much on numberscalculations, especially those involving money, can lead to negative consequences, including social and moral transgressions, says a new paper. Based on several experiments, researchers concluded that people in a "calculative mindset" as a result of number-crunching are more likely to analyze non-numerical problems mathematically and not take into account social, moral or interpersonal factors. Chen-Bo Zhong. Credit: Rotman School Participants in a set of experiments…

A recent paper makes a connection between the quantum group SLq(2), which describes knots, and the elementary particles of the Standard Model.  A mathematical knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space. Unlike your shoes, with their knot the ends are joined together so it cannot be undone. The Standard Model, created in the 1970s, is the dominant hypothesis concerning electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions in fundamental particles. Some suggest that leptons, neutrinos, and quarks might be composite and the authors seeks to make…

Mathematical techniques that not only identify whether two data sets correlate, but also whether one drives the other, have allowed researchers to look at a lot of old data in new ways. Methods have been developed to try to identify and correct for bias in the fossil record but the new research suggests many of these correction methods may actually be misleading.  The new results show that out of all the geological factors, only the area of preserved rock drives biodiversity. Therefore, the other geological factors – counts of fossil collections and geological formations – are not…