This Video Shows Just How Beautiful Mathematics Is

This Video Shows Just How Beautiful Mathematics Is: "Betrand Russell once wrote that '[m]athematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.' In this video, Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux prove him right.

In the triptych video, an equation appears on the left, a technical diagram in the middle, and real-life footage of the phenomenon in question on the right. Covering everything from the motion of spinning of a top, through computer architecture, to the sugar in your coffee, it shows how simple and elegant mathematical equations can explain incredibly complex concepts. Mathematics really is beautiful. "

Run historic software in your Web browser - TechBlog

Run historic software in your Web browser - TechBlog: "The personal computer revolution is now almost 40 years old – if you date it from the original Altair 8800 – and a lot of software has come and gone since then. Many of the earliest applications won’t run on today’s powerful machines – if you can find copies of them at all.

For some time, The Internet Archive has maintained a collection of classic code that you could download, though you might have to find and install the right emulation software. Now, the site has made it easy to run some of the programs right in your Web browser with the Historical Software Archive.

That’s right, now you can once again experience the thrill of writing in WordStar, in all its green-screen, CP/M-based glory."

Family's anger as council orders removal of sudoku headstone of mathematician Allan Robinson | Mail Online

Family's anger as council orders removal of sudoku headstone of mathematician Allan Robinson | Mail Online: "When retired mathematician Allan Robinson passed away after a battle with cancer, his grieving family chose an epitaph that he would have heartily approved of – a sudoku puzzle and equation.

It did not take long, however, before zealous officials on the parish council had formed their own rather bizarre opinion of the gravestone.

They ordered Mr Robinson’s widow Angela to remove the highly personal engravings because they are ‘contrary to guidelines for headstone inscriptions’."

Formula for the perfect PIZZA revealed: Mathematician creates equation to ensure you don't burn - or undercook - a margherita | Mail Online

Formula for the perfect PIZZA revealed: Mathematician creates equation to ensure you don't burn - or undercook - a margherita | Mail Online: "Soggy bottoms and burnt crusts could be a thing of the past for troubled cooks who are making pizzas from scratch at home.

A mathematician claims to have come up with the first-ever formula for the 'perfectly proportioned' pizza, taking into account factors like the ratio of topping to base.

Dr Eugenia Cheng said pizza lovers get more topping per bite in a smaller pizza, but a more even spread of bites in a larger pizza."

Voevodsky’s Mathematical Revolution | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Voevodsky’s Mathematical Revolution | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network: "Voevodsky told mathematicians that their lives are about to change. Soon enough, they’re going to find themselves doing mathematics at the computer, with the aid of computer proof assistants. Soon, they won’t consider a theorem proven until a computer has verified it. Soon, they’ll be able to collaborate freely, even with mathematicians whose skills they don’t have confidence in. And soon, they’ll understand the foundations of mathematics very differently."

The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks | Television & radio | The Observer

The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks | Television & radio | The Observer: "Without doubt, the most mathematically sophisticated television show in the history of primetime broadcasting is The Simpsons. This is not a figment of my deranged mind, which admittedly is obsessed with both The Simpsons and mathematics, but rather it is a concrete claim backed up in a series of remarkable episodes."

Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics

Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics | Simons Foundation: "Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

‘This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,’ said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work."

How to Fall in Love With Math - NYTimes.com

How to Fall in Love With Math - NYTimes.com: "EACH time I hear someone say, ‘Do the math,’ I grit my teeth. Invariably a reference to something mundane like addition or multiplication, the phrase reinforces how little awareness there is about the breadth and scope of the subject, how so many people identify mathematics with just one element: arithmetic. Imagine, if you will, using, ‘Do the lit’ as an exhortation to spell correctly."

Mathematica—Celebrating 25 Years of Contributions, Invention, Discovery, and Education

Mathematica—Celebrating 25 Years of Contributions, Invention, Discovery, and Education: "The Mathematica Story: A Scrapbook"

Mathematical Impressions: Making Music with a Möbius Strip: Scientific American

Mathematical Impressions: Making Music with a Möbius Strip: Scientific American: "The connections between mathematics and music are many. For example, the differential equations of vibrating strings and surfaces help us understand harmonics and tuning systems, rhythm analysis tells us the ways a measure can be divided into beats, and the study of symmetry relates to the translations in time and pitch that occur in a fugue or canon."

Pascal's intellect helped him blaze trails in mathematics | The Tennessean | tennessean.com

Pascal's intellect helped him blaze trails in mathematics | The Tennessean | tennessean.com: "In 1642, when he was 19, Blaise Pascal thought he would try to ease his father’s burdens.

His father, Etienne Pascal, had been appointed chief tax collector in Rouen, France. The position was demanding, requiring hours of work each day adding up taxes due and paid. Blaise Pascal had an idea to speed up the arithmetical drudgery. Pascal, already a noted mathematician, built the first mechanical calculator and presented it to the chancellor of France in 1645. The machines were very expensive; he made about 20 of them."

Mathematics 'the key' to solving transport woes

Mathematics 'the key' to solving transport woes: "Imagine buses turning up every five minutes, and schedules that could deliver passengers to just about anywhere across the city. Impossible? Laughably expensive?

Professor Mark Wallace from the Monash University's Faculty of Information Technology says it's a goer. Mathematics, not massive infrastructure spending, is the key.

'You'd need twice as many buses, not 10 times as most people might imagine,' he says.

Some of the initiatives to make it work include adaptive scheduling (where the local schedule is flexible, and responds to direct consumer demand); more bus lanes; and, a system where local bus networks talk to one another and have coordinated changeover stations, so you have more efficient use of the limited bus numbers, which works against traffic congestion."

Mathematics is not a friend of baseball | Dallas-Fort Worth Sports News - Sports News on the ...

Mathematics is not a friend of baseball | Dallas-Fort Worth Sports News - Sports News on the ...: "The counting craze that once was cute and chic is now all but ruining America’s second favorite pastime.

Scores of math whizzes, nerds and live-in-their-parents’-basement geeks are threatening to turn Royals at Rangers into a Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky chess match, minus the intellect.

This absurd baseball math obsession is now spilling over into basketball, hockey and football; in a few months, this trend will turn your child’s dodgeball game into a series of where is the best place to put little Jimmy so as to ensure his greatest chances of being able to dip, dive, duck and dodge.

Baseball was never intended to be math homework, but now baseball fans are watching pitch counts more closely than we do wins/losses, strikeouts or ERAs.

Kids, don’t listen to your parents or teachers. In this case, math is not your friend."

Texas banker puts up $1M for tricky math solution - Houston Chronicle

Texas banker puts up $1M for tricky math solution - Houston Chronicle: "A Texas banker is upping the ante to $1 million for whoever solves a tricky problem that's been dogging mathematicians since the 1980s.

The Providence, R.I.-based American Mathematical Society on Tuesday said $1 million will be awarded for the publication of a solution to the Beal Conjecture number theory problem.

Dallas banker D. Andrew Beal first offered the Beal Prize in 1997 for $5,000. Over the years, the amount has grown.

American Mathematical Society spokesman Michael Breen says a solution is more difficult than the one for a related problem, Fermat's Last Theorem, which didn't have a published solution for hundreds of years.

Beal is a self-taught mathematician and says he wants to inspire young people to pursue math and science."

13 Jokes That Every Math Geek Will Find Hilarious - SFGate

13 Jokes That Every Math Geek Will Find Hilarious - SFGate: "A physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician are sitting on a bench across from a house. They watch as two people go into the house, and then a little later, three people walk out.

The physicist says, 'The initial measurement was incorrect.'

The biologist says, 'They must have reproduced.'

And the mathematician says, 'If exactly one person enters that house, it will be empty.'"

That figures: Professor who had to work at Subway dazzles world of maths after solving centuries-old prime number riddle - Science - News - The Independent

That figures: Professor who had to work at Subway dazzles world of maths after solving centuries-old prime number riddle - Science - News - The Independent: "A university professor who was forced to work at Subway when he couldn't find a job as an academic has solved a prime number riddle that has puzzled the best mathematical brains for centuries.

Dr Yitang Zhang was enjoying the summer holiday in a friend's back garden in Colorado last year when it suddenly occurred to him that he could make a major breakthrough in the field of analytic number theory.

Prime numbers - which are only divisible by one and themselves - often come in pairs that differ by two. Five and seven, for instance, or 11 and 13. They're known as twin primes.

As numbers get larger, it becomes harder to find prime numbers. But for hundreds of years, mathematicians have believed there are an infinite number of these pairs - known as the twin prime conjecture.

While Dr Zhang could not prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes, he has found that there are an infinite number of prime pairs separated by less than 70 million. It may sound like a colossal gap, but he has essentially wrestled that figure down from infinity."

The Consequences of Machine Intelligence - Moshe Y. Vardi - The Atlantic

The Consequences of Machine Intelligence - Moshe Y. Vardi - The Atlantic: "The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers."

The Most Controversial Math Problems - Business Insider

The Most Controversial Math Problems - Business Insider: "Mathematics has little surprises that are designed to test and push your mental limits. The following 12 simple math problems prove outstandingly controversial among students of math, but are nonetheless facts. They're paradoxes and idiosyncrasies of probability.  And they're guaranteed to start an argument or two.  "

The mathematics of juries: The jury size and voting margins necessary for a fair trial. - Slate Magazine

The mathematics of juries: The jury size and voting margins necessary for a fair trial. - Slate Magazine: "The Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, was perhaps the first person to subject juries to mathematical analysis. In 1785, he proved a theorem that could be succinctly summarized, ‘More is better.’ Assuming that all the members of a jury have a better than 50 percent chance of determining the true innocence or guilt of the accused—a big assumption but a common one in mathematical studies of juries—larger juries are more likely to decide correctly than smaller ones."

Windows: It's over

Windows: It's over | ZDNet: "Most people in our recent debate over the future of Windows 8 thought that the operating system could be saved. I'm sure many people in 1491 thought that the Earth was flat, too.

If Windows 8 continues the way it has been, it will be the end of Windows. The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved. "

FP Journe: Horological High - Billionaire

FP Journe: Horological High - Billionaire: "Although he only established his eponymous brand in 1999, François-Paul Journe’s watches fulfil all the criteria demanded by the world’s most discerning horolophiles."

Something Electronic This Way Comes: Ray Bradbury eBooks Announced! - SF Signal

Something Electronic This Way Comes: Ray Bradbury eBooks Announced! - SF Signal: "At what temperature do eBooks burn? The pyro-curious can now find out when William Morrow begins releasing Ray Bradbury’s back catalog in eBook format this month."

The Mathematics of Averting the Next Big Network Failure | Wired Science | Wired.com

The Mathematics of Averting the Next Big Network Failure | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Gene Stanley never walks down stairs without holding the handrail. For a fit 71-year-old, he is deathly afraid of breaking his hip. In the elderly, such breaks can trigger fatal complications, and Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University, thinks he knows why.

‘Everything depends on everything else,’ he said.

Three years ago, Stanley and his colleagues discovered the mathematics behind what he calls ‘the extreme fragility of interdependency.’ In a system of interconnected networks like the economy, city infrastructure or the human body, their model indicates that a small outage in one network can cascade through the entire system, touching off a sudden, catastrophic failure."

Should business be allowed to patent mathematics?

Should business be allowed to patent mathematics? - opinion - 18 March 2013 - New Scientist: "AT SOME point in their career every mathematician comes up against the question, is mathematics invented or discovered? The query makes some cranky. The answer doesn't directly affect their work, after all, and the discussion often leads nowhere useful. Spending time debating the ultimate nature of mathematics takes away from actually doing it."

Tolkien's books analyzed - LotrProject

Tolkien's books analyzed - LotrProject: "AN INTERACTIVE ANALYSIS OF TOLKIEN'S WORKS the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings --- Being passionate about both Tolkien and data visualization creating an interactive analysis of Tolkien's books seemed like a wonderful idea. To the left you will be able to explore character mentions and keyword frequency as well as sentiment analysis of the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Information on editions of the books and methods used can be found in the about section."

A Most Peculiar Test Drive | Blog | Tesla Motors

A Most Peculiar Test Drive | Blog | Tesla Motors: "After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives. While the vast majority of journalists are honest, some believe the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story. In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being ‘tested’). Our car never even had a chance.

The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running."

Amateur effort finds new largest prime number | Business Tech - CNET News

Amateur effort finds new largest prime number | Business Tech - CNET News: "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has scored its 14th consecutive victory, discovering the largest prime number so far. The number, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, is a digit that's 17,425,170 digits long. That's big enough that if you want to see the full text, you'll have to brace yourself for a 22.5MB download. GIMPS, a cooperative project splitting the search across thousands of independent computers, announced the find yesterday after it had been confirmed by other checks. At present, there are 98,980 people and 574 teams involved in the GIMPS project; their 730,562 processors perform about 129 trillion calculations per second. The project has a lock on the market for mongo new prime numbers. The discoverer of this particular prime is Curtis Cooper, a professor at the University of Central Missouri who runs the prime-hunting software on a network of computers and who's found record primes in 2005 and 2006. It's not just his effort that's important, though; it relied also on others' machines ruling out other candidates. A prime number is divisible only by itself and the number 1. Once a mathematical curiosity, primes now are crucial to encrypted communications. Mersenne primes are named after Marin Mersenne, a French monk born in 1588 who investigated a particular type of prime number: 2 to the power of 'p' minus one, in which 'p' is an ordinary prime number. Cooper's find is the 48th Mersenne prime so far discovered. GIMPS has found the 14 largest Mersenne primes, the organization said."

World’s largest prime number discovered -- all 17 million digits | Fox News

World’s largest prime number discovered -- all 17 million digits | Fox News: "If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, prime numbers are a mathematician’s.

And Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg has just found the biggest, shiniest diamond of them all.

As part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a computer program that networks PCs worldwide to collectively hunt for a special type of prime number, Cooper discovered the largest prime number yet late last month: a beast with 17,425,170 digits."

What Birds Know About Fractal Geometry - ScienceNOW

ScienceShot: What Birds Know About Fractal Geometry - ScienceNOW: "Birds, do your math: The pattern of feathers on the chest of your potential mate might provide a good sense of his or her overall health and well-being. In a new study, researchers find that a single number that describes the complexity of those configurations, a parameter called the fractal dimension, is linked to whether a bird has a strong immune system or is malnourished. (Fractals, possibly most well-known from pop art posters of the 1970s, are incredibly complex patterns that have the same amount of detail at all levels of scale, from the huge to the microscopic.) When scientists restricted the food of red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa, inset), the feather patterns (details in main image) on their chests had a lower fractal dimension than those sported by their well-fed colleagues, they report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The food-restricted birds, on average, weighed 13% less than their well-fed colleagues and had weaker immune systems, which makes fractal dimension an easily recognizable sign of a potential mate's health and vitality, the researchers contend. "

Scrabble needs new scoring system, researcher says - World - CBC News

Scrabble needs new scoring system, researcher says - World - CBC News: "An American researcher is calling for an overhaul of Scrabble's scoring system, arguing that the classic board game has become outdated.

Joshua Lewis says that certain letters are now overvalued in the context of the modern English language.

'The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed,' he told British media.

'Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.'

Lewis created a program called Valett that recalculates the values of each letter to better reflect modern usage."

Cheating in Chess

The Crown Game Affair « Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: "Faye Dunaway is an Academy Award-winning actress who co-starred with the late Steve McQueen in the 1968 movie ‘The Thomas Crown Affair.’ She plays a freelance insurance fraud investigator, Vicki Anderson, who believes that millionaire playboy Thomas Crown is guilty of instigating a $2.6 million bank heist, but falls in love with him anyway. The most famous scene in the movie shows her both defeating and seducing Crown in a game of chess.

Today I write about the difficulty of detecting fraud at chess, and the role of statistical evidence."

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions | MIT Technology Review

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions | MIT Technology Review: "A toppling domino can push over a larger domino but how much bigger can the next one be? One mathematician thinks he’s worked out the secret behind domino chain reactions"