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researcher is calling for an overhaul of Scrabble's scoring system, arguing that the classic board game has become outdated.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"

100-year-old deathbed dreams of mathematician proved true | Fox News

100-year-old deathbed dreams of mathematician proved true | Fox News: "While on his death bed, the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan cryptically wrote down functions he said came to him in dreams, with a hunch about how they behaved. Now 100 years later, researchers say they've proved he was right.

'We've solved the problems from his last mysterious letters. For people who work in this area of math, the problem has been open for 90 years,' Emory University mathematician Ken Ono said."

Mathematical proof reveals magic of Ramanujan's genius - physics-math - 08 November 2012 - New Scientist

Mathematical proof reveals magic of Ramanujan's genius - physics-math - 08 November 2012 - New Scientist: "PROOFS are the currency of mathematics, but Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the all-time great mathematicians, often managed to skip them. Now a proof has been found for a connection that he seemed to mysteriously intuit between two types of mathematical function.

The proof deepens the intrigue surrounding the workings of Ramanujan's enigmatic mind. It may also help physicists learn more about black holes - even though these objects were virtually unknown during the Indian mathematician's lifetime.

Born in 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan was self-taught and worked in almost complete isolation from the mathematical community of his time. Described as a raw genius, he independently rediscovered many existing results, as well as making his own unique contributions, believing his inspiration came from the Hindu goddess Namagiri. But he is also known for his unusual style, often leaping from insight to insight without formally proving the logical steps in between. 'His ideas as to what constituted a mathematical proof were of the most shadowy description,' said G. H.Hardy (pictured, far right), Ramanujan's mentor and one of his few collaborators."

Supercomputing to solve a superproblem in mathematics | News | R&D Magazine

Supercomputing to solve a superproblem in mathematics | News | R&D Magazine: "A world-famous mathematician responsible for solving one of the subject's most challenging problems has published his latest work as a University of Leicester research report.     This follows the visit that famed mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich made to the Department of Mathematics where he talked about his pioneering work. He visited UK by invitation of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.     In 1900, twenty-three unsolved mathematical problems, known as Hilbert's Problems, were compiled as a definitive list by mathematician David Hilbert.     A century later, the seven most important unsolved mathematical problems to date, known as the 'Millennium Problems', were listed by the Clay Mathematics Institute. Solving one of these Millennium Problems has a reward of US $1,000,000, and so far only one has been resolved, namely the famous Poincare Conjecture, which only recently was verified by G. Perelman.     Yuri Matiyasevich found a negative solution to one of Hilbert's problems. Now, he's working on the more challenging of maths problems—and the only one that appears on both lists—Riemann's zeta function hypothesis.     In his presentation at the University, Matiyasevich discussed Riemann's hypothesis, a conjecture so important and so difficult to prove that even Hilbert himself commented: 'If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?'"