A Chinese supercomputer appears to have taken the #1 spot on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Although the final rankings of the twice-yearly published list is not yet final, Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who co-manages the Top500 list, says that “it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.” Dongarra adds that the Chinese computer, which achieved 2.5 Pflop/s (2.5 x 1015 floating-point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark, “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.”
The new system, according to a separate report by Dongarra, has 7168
Continue reading Chinese supercomputer is world’s #1 system
The present bloggers have written some new papers and presentations on pi that are targeted to a wide audience. These files are freely available for download:
David H. Bailey, “A short history of pi formulas,” manuscript, Oct 2010, available at PDF. Jonathan Borwein, “The Life of Pi,” manuscript, Sep 2010, available at PDF. Jonathan Borwein, “The Life of Pi,” presentation, Sep 2010, PDF.
Retired Brown University mathematics professor David Mumford is among 10 scientists to receive the 2010 National Medal of Science, which is granted each year by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He will receive the award later this year in a ceremony at the White House in Washington. Mumford joins a list renowned scholars that includes numerous Nobel laureates, among them James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA structure.
Although Mumford originally intended to pursue a career in physics, he fell in love with mathematics during his undergraduate years. “[When] I got to quantum field theory, … it was really too complicated
Continue reading David Mumford receives National Medal of Science
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, a pioneer in the field of fractals, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85.
Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” for figures that exhibit self-similar irregularities across a wide range of spatial dimensions. The field has numerous applications in physics, biology, and even mathematical finance. Many of these applications were first identified and analyzed by Mandelbrot himself.
David Mumford of Brown University explains as follows: “Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a
Continue reading Benoit Mandelbrot dies
At the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) confidently predicted a new wave of discoveries that would revolutionize technology and society. For example, Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do,” and Marvin Minsky wrote that “within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved” [Crevier1993]. Needless to say, in spite of advances in computer hardware vastly exceeding even the most optimistic predictions at the time, many of the exuberant goals
Continue reading Can machines teach themselves?
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