Mathematics
A young boy sits on the carpet, his feet disappearing into a giant pair of sweatpants he put on over his own clothes before loosely tying his ankles together.
He has taken the sweatpants off and is now trying to put them back on inside out without removing the ankle cuffs.
Yes, it can be done.
Holly Bernstein, who earned a PhD in mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis in 1999, watches him struggle for a bit and then says, “Remember the pants have more than one hole. You don’t necessarily have to put them back on the way you put them on in the first place.”
Having dropped that…
A desire to be part of the 'in crowd' could damage our ability to make the right decisions, according to a paper in the
journal Interface which claims that individuals have evolved to be overly influenced by their neighbors, rather than rely on their own instinct.
As a result, they believe, groups become less responsive to changes in their natural environment. So much for the wisdom of crowds.
"Social influence is a powerful force in nature and society," says lead author Dr. Colin Torney, from the University of Exeter's Mathematics department. "Copying what other individuals do can be useful…
When it comes to math, people mis-characterize themselves quite often. About 20 percent of the people who say they are bad at math score in the top half of tests while about 33 percent of people who say they are good at math score in the bottom half.
What explains it? People have differing ideas about math. People who think they're good at math have a numeric competency that may be helpful in some real-life situations, so they think they are good at math even if they do poorly when actually tested.
"Some people mis-categorize themselves. They really don't know how good they are…
In the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners kept isolated from each other are offered a deal: they can confess to a crime and if their accomplice remains silent the charges will be dropped in exchange for testimony against the other. If they both confess, they can both get early parole. If both remain silent, they get convicted of a lesser charge.
If both players cooperate with each other, they both receive a payoff but if one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the…
There is such a thing as 'too precise' when it comes to numbers. So what's appropriate? Erik Olsson, CC BY-NC-SA
By Jonathan Borwein (Jon), University of Newcastle and David H. Bailey, University of California, Davis
When numbers of any sort are presented in mathematics, science, business, government or finance, it’s fair to say a reader assumes that the data are reasonably reliable to their last digit.
But presenting data to more digits of accuracy than is appropriate from the context can be deeply misleading, conveying much more reliability than is really present in the data.
If a light…
Kelly Abbott/Flickr, CC BY-NC
By Tim Trudgian, Australian National University
Consider a standard pizza box containing a standard circular pizza. How much more would you be willing to pay for a square pizza that filled the box?
Clearly the square pizza contains more pizza: but is it worth the extra A$2 that Domino’s Pizza is asking?
Domino’s has, for a limited time only (presumably before too many people examine the mathematics), resumed the offer of a surcharge of A$2 on any pizza to obtain a box full Square Puff option – a square rather than the traditional circle.
An ad from 2010 for…
The golden ratio is known as the divine proportion because it is found so often in nature. It has fascinated mathematicians since Euclid. A golden ratio is when the ratio of two numbers is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.
Credit: Wikipedia
Represented by the Greek letter phi (φ), its value is 1.61803399.
Now a team of scholars are suggesting that the Golden Ratio also relates to the topology of space-time, and to a biological species constant (T), a “cosmic constant” found in the curvature of elephant tusks, the shape of a kudu’s horn, the destructive…
In a famous mathematical thought experiment, the goal is to make randomness deterministic by closed-form equation, so mathematicians tried to determine the path of a 'drunken sailor' staggering around a town.
If there are street lamps, he will run into them, change his direction and keep moving until he gets out of the city. Logically, the time he spends in the area depends on the number of street lamps but the surprising answer is that the number of streetlamps are not the big factor.
First, look at the problem in simple form, using only a few exits, courtesy of the University of…
Vaccines are medical technology and like all technology some of the production runs are misfires. Some shots fail due to "leakiness," lack of effectiveness on certain individuals in a population, or shorter duration of potency.
What happens as a result? Felicia Magpantay, Maria Riolo, Matthieu Domenech de Celles, Aaron King, and Pejman Rohani used a mathematical model to determine the consequences of vaccine failure and resulting disease dynamics. While leakiness, degree and duration of coverage have direct effects at the individual level, the protection from imperfect vaccines and…
In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then the concept of 'embedded' emissions has been used by anti-meat proponents.
"It takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" is easy to remember. It is elegant. It is also completely wrong. Regardless, the virtual environmental cost of meat became a craze and it was soon followed by virtual water. The virtual water in the grain in just one part of Egypt is more than all of the water in the Nile so…