Mathematics
Economics Professors Predict Barack Obama Will Win Presidential Election With 52 Percent Of The Vote
Based on past elections and economic factors, two professors at the University of Oregon predict that Senator Barack Obama will win the presidential election by a 52 to 48 margin.
In the paper "A Disaggregate Approach to Economic Models of Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections: Forecasts of the 2008 Election," published in the Economics Bulletin, economic professors Stephen Haynes and Joe Stone's research shows that lowest-income states prefer McCain by 55.4 percent to 44.6 percent. Middle income states are almost evenly split between the two candidates and highest-income states prefer Obama…
New Jersey Institute of Technology professor Bruce Bukiet, a mathematician who has applied mathematical modeling techniques to the dynamics of scoring in baseball, has computed the probability of the Rays and Phillies winning the World Series now that the Rays have defeated the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. He recently released the names of those most deserving of Major League Baseball's prestigious 2008 Most Valuable Player (MVP) and Cy Young awards.
This is the eighth year that Bukiet has used his model to determine whether it is worthwhile to wager on games…
In a seminar co-organized by Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Kannam Soundararajan, Professor of Mathematics, announced that he and Roman Holowinsky have proven a significant version of the quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) conjecture.
The motivation behind the problem is to understand how waves are influenced by the geometry of their enclosure. Imagine sound waves in a concert hall. In a well-designed concert hall you can hear every note from every seat. The sound waves spread out uniformly and evenly. At the opposite extreme are "whispering galleries" where…
Today, Sept. 19, 2008 is the major sign that NASA finally gets it! Risk understanding has arrived at NASA with the move of the Space Shuttle Endeavour to the launch pad. This is the first time that NASA has had a space shuttle in a rescue mode.
NASA gets it that their risk management requires action in case something goes wrong with the upcoming Hubble Space Telescope Mission of Atlantis. Endeavour traveled all night to its destination so that it can lift off within a week of Atlantis' launch, if required.
October 10 is the planned date for Atlantis' lift-off but a delay is possible due to a…
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Alan Guth’s Inflation Theory is a pioneering work. Hitherto, cosmologists had only defined what the big bang actually was without addressing the reasons for the event. Before, the inflation theory, there were several loopholes in the big bang model. In fact, some even contradicted the theory of relativity. Further the basic cosmological principles of homogeneity and isotropy also went unexplained.
The Theory of Inflation solved many of these conundrums.
Inflation is the phase our universe passed through immediately after the big bang. In it, it expanded rapidly leading to a flat and…
Invisibility once belonged squarely in the realm of science fiction but in the last few years advancements in metamaterials have made it an exciting possibility, though not yet in the range of normal human vision or on a cost-effective basis.
Scientists in the Departments of Applied Physics and Electromagnetism at the University of Granada have taken a different tack, using the Transmission Line Method(TLM).
In 1885, Oliver Heaviside created the first transmission line model to understand the behavior of wires in the telegraph. That's right, pre-telephone Morse Code stuff. Future tech like…
It sounds like common sense to say the level of nutrients in soil determines how many different kinds of plants and trees can thrive in an ecosystem, but it's only now that mathematicians have modelled all the different possible relationships between nutrients and biodiversity in lab-based experimental ecosystems.
Writing in Nature, they found that although nutrient availability definitely has an impact on biodiversity, the precise relationship between the two depends on which species are present in the ecosystem. This means that in some cases low levels of nutrients can lead to high levels…
This piece is a little old, and is ostensibly about Presidential candidates, but the advice applies to anyone with a 'wired' job who needs to think, including scientists and science writers:
In London, Obama and [British Conservative Leader] Cameron commiserated about their days, which are arranged in 15-minute intervals of crisis. They react, but they never have time to reflect. Cameron said he tried to not let aides "chalk up" his schedule with too many commitments. Obama's solution was to set aside time to let his brain work during his mid-August vacation. "The most important thing you…
Was Hippasus pushed?
If you are even mildly interested in the history of mathematics, it is likely that you will have heard something like the following story. The Pythagoreans (who were also into music in a big way) worshipped numbers, and believed them to be the basis of everything. If one were to do a modern caricature of this, it might go:
Do you believe in Rock ’n’ Roll?
Can mathematics save your soul?
By numbers, they meant whole numbers or positive integers. Whether this included ‘one’ is a moot point, because later Greek mathematicians regarded ‘one’ as the ‘generator of…
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanosconiosis is a type of lung disease. Pneumoconiosis, also called black lung or coal-miners disease, is different, but is estimated to be the cause of death for 1,500 U.S. coal miners. Besides being bizarre, words like these can be largely informative. The top scientific and mathematical words and laws judging off of complexity can transpire into a largely personal-opinion-oriented endeavor. Astute denizens of cyberspace expounded on a list of some semi-rare and contentious terms and classified them into an “organized mess.”
1. Borborgymus -The technical…