Fermi’s Paradox and Stephen Hawking

In the summer of 1950, while having lunch with colleagues who were chatting about recent reports of “flying saucers” in the news, nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?” [Web2002, pg. 17-18]. Behind his question was the following line of reasoning: (a) There are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy; (b) It is highly likely that other technological civilizations are many thousands of years more advanced than us (since if they are less advanced by even a few decades they would not be technological); (c) In a few million years, they could have

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April 30th, 2010 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Bailey to give keynote speech at SHARCNet Research Day

Next week David H. Bailey of LBNL is giving the keynote speech at the “SHARCNet Research Day,” a meeting of researchers affiliated with Canada’s leading high-performance computing network. This will be held 6 May 2010 at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The talk is entitled “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific and Mathematical Discovery”. It gives an overview of the many components of modern high-performance computing (hardware, software, algorithms, numerical techniques, parallelization techniques, etc), which the speaker likens to a “Symphony.” Here is the announcement: SHARCNet meeting

Abstract:

The latest state-of-the-art scientific computer systems have achieved over 1

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April 30th, 2010 | Category: News | Comments are closed

Steven Strogatz’s NY Times articles on math

Our colleague Steven Strogatz has written a series of articles on mathematics, targeted to a “lay” reader, for the “Opinionator” series of the New York Times. Stogratz’s latest article reconstructs Archimedes’ discovery of how pi can be seen to be a limit of areas of inscribed and circumscribed polygons: Strogatz article on limits.

Strogatz’s other articles can be read here: Strogatz math articles.

April 4th, 2010 | Category: News | Comments are closed