Does "Touch" Get the Math Right?

Dr. Keith Devlin: Does Touch Get the Math Right?: "The new Fox TV series Touch, starring Kiefer Sutherland, has as one of its central characters a mathematically gifted, autistic, 11-year-old child Jake, played by David Mazouz. How accurate is the portrayal of mathematics in the show? Based on the first episode, the answer is, "Not very." (The caveat is, it doesn't really matter.)

The first number we encounter, by way of Jake's disembodied voice (he does not speak, so we only hear him as a thought-track) is the golden ratio, approximately 1.618. Thematically, that's good, since that number does occur a lot in nature, often by way of its closely associated Fibonacci sequence. Which makes it all the more perplexing that, midway through the first episode, we have Danny Glover's character repeating a series of oft-recycled falsehoods about the Fibonacci sequence.

He begins by saying that it was discovered by the twelfth-century mathematician Fibonacci, which is not true. Fibonacci (who was in fact a thirteenth-century mathematician, and who was not given that nickname until the 19th century) simply included in a book he wrote, an ancient arithmetic problem that yields those numbers when you solve it. There is no evidence that he ever investigated the sequence. Besides, most of the sequence's interesting mathematical properties and its connections to the natural world were not discovered until many centuries later.

Though there are many fascinating examples of the occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, the three that Glover cites are all wrong: that the sequence can be found in the curve of a wave, in the spiral of a shell, and in the segments of a pineapple."

 

The Mathematics of Jury Size

 

The Mathematics of Jury Size | News Service - ISNS: "Could different jury sizes improve the quality of justice? The answers are not clear, but mathematicians are analyzing juries to identify potential improvements.

Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say that juries in criminal cases must include 12 people, or that their decisions must be unanimous. In fact, some states use juries of different sizes.

One primary reason why today's juries tend to have 12 people is that the Welsh king Morgan of Gla-Morgan, who established jury trials in 725 A.D., decided upon the number, linking the judge and jury to Jesus and his Twelve Apostles."

 

On the hunt for mathematical beauty

On the hunt for mathematical beauty - MIT News Office: "“Imagine an airplane in which each row has one seat, and there are 100 seats,” Borodin says. “People line up in random order to fill the plane, and each person has a carry-on suitcase in their hand, which it takes them one minute to put into the overhead compartment.”

If the passengers all board the plane in an orderly fashion, starting from the rear seats and working their way forwards, it would be a very quick process, Borodin says. But in reality, people queue up in a random order, significantly slowing things down.

So how long would it take to board the aircraft? “It’s not an easy problem to solve, but it is possible,” Borodin says. “It turns out that it is approximately equal to twice the square root of the number of people in the queue.” So with a 100-seat airplane, boarding would take 20 minutes, he says."

 

Hazudra Fodder: Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool.

Hazudra Fodder: Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool.: "Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool. I'll get right to the point, it's beyond me as to why anyone (businesses, educational institutions, individuals) would want to use MATLAB except for very specialized purposes. GNU Octave has almost identical syntax and is FREE. Let's compare them:"

Why Mathematica is Better Than Matlab

Wolfram General Mathematica Training Course: A Speed Date: "This course provides a whirlwind tour of Mathematica showing how decades of research in computation, language, and development together with well-thought-out design principles and solid software engineering have guided us in creating a modern computing platform. Key features, including dynamic interactivity, natural language input, and numerical/symbolic computation, as well as applications in image processing, control systems, GPU computation, and more, will be explored."

Comparing Matlab and Mathematica

Comparing Matlab and Mathematica - by walkiria - Helium: "The comparison between Matlab and Mathematica is NOT numeric versus symbolic as some claim. It is 'high level complete system' versus 'low level core with specialist toolboxes'. Mathematica can do all the numeric math and matrix work that Matlab can do, as fast and as accurately. Matlab is almost strictly a subset of the functionality of Mathematica."

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur -- Daily Intel: "It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported: Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership. "One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore." "He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said.  Burn.  We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling.  "I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there."  Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed. She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'" In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there.""

Abandon MATLAB

Why write this? « Abandon MATLAB: "Well, MATLAB was obviously an improvement over FORTRAN for working scientists and engineers, in much the same way that Perl was an improvement over Sed, Awk and shell. So MATLAB was pretty good, in the ’90s, I suppose. Today, it’s an ancient language..."

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet: "Summary: Windows 8 is a massive gamble for Microsoft, and right now I can see the potential for it to fail harder than Windows Vista did.

I’ve been using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview since its release back at the end of February, and having used it extensively on a number of several physical and virtual systems, I can now put my finger on what I think is wrong with Microsoft’s latest incarnation of Windows."

 

The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010

No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010: "The Tau Manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice for the circle constant is π—but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article “π Is Wrong!”1, π is wrong. It’s time to set things right."

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard: "You may have have thought that games like Mario, Donkey Kong and so on were hard at the time you were playing them, but you probably didn't guess that they were NP-hard. NP-hard problems are in a sense the ones that are most difficult to solve by computational means because the time it takes to find a solution tends to increase so quickly with the size of the problem that it just isn't practical to perform the computation. Now we have some results from computer scientists at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that many classic games contain within them an NP-hard problem. It is a bit like the discovery of a black hole at the center of every galaxy. Should either fact be surprising?"

Pi Goes to Washington

TeachPi.org: "Only 112 years after its last appearance on a legislative floor—the doomed bill in the Indiana statehouse that offered nine different values for the number—Pi made a surprise appearance in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009.

March 14 fell on a Saturday in 2009, but that didn‘t stop things from heating up in the week leading up to it. On Monday, March 8th, Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee introduced House Resolution 224, officially called “Supporting the designation of Pi Day, and for other purposes.” As the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Gordon’s intent was clear: to use the holiday as a platform for making a statement about the importance of math and science education in America."