Counting on mathematics, now more than ever — Opinion — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine: "Recently, someone asked me how many of the following four names I recognized: Jeremy Linn, Andrei Markov, Meryl Streep and Isaac Schoenberg, and I’d like to pose the same question to you.
My guess is you will recognize two of the four. Actually, the quiz is a fraud. It’s just my awkward way of announcing that April is National Mathematics Awareness Month and to make a basic point that although mathematics never makes headlines like an NBA star or winning an Oscar, it might play a more important role in our daily lives, and that’s where the two unrecognizable names on the list come in.
Andrei Markov was a Russian mathematician who in 1906 worked out a mathematical theory, called Markov Chains, for describing how many physical systems evolve over time. Such a system might be anything from a baseball game, a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, the evolution of a biological population of bacteria or even a person surfing the Internet, clicking from one Web page to another."
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