How far away is everybody?

[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]

Introduction

Many of us know that the sun is approximately 150 million km or 93 million miles away, a distance that is known as the “astronomical unit” (AU). Neptune, the most distant planet, is 30 AU from the sun, or some 44.8 billion km (27.9 billion mi). The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, reached Jupiter just two years later, but did not reach Neptune until 1989.

The nearest stars, Alpha Centauri A-B and Proxima

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September 29th, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Borwein gives talk on teaching and learning

Professor Jonathan M. Borwein delivered the keynote talk Teaching and Researching with Collaboration Tools and Technology as part of the 2011 Australian Learning and Teaching Council workshop, “Effective Teaching, Effective Learning in the Quantitative Disciplines,” held 29-30 Sep 2011 at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. This practical, hands-on and interactive workshop immediately followed the Australian Mathematical Society 55th Annual Meeting at the University of Wollongong (26-29 September, 2011). It has been designed specifically for lecturers and tutors teaching in the quantitative disciplines.

Additional details can be found at ALTC Workshop website.

September 28th, 2011 | Category: News | Comments are closed

Review of “Loving and Hating Mathematics”

Loving and Hating Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2010) is the child of two passionate scholars: a mathematician (Reuben Hersh) and a social scientist (Vera John-Steiner). Reuben Hersh has written for many articles for the Intelligencer, as well as earlier books such as The Mathematical Experience, coauthored with Davis and Marchisotto, and What is Mathematics Really?.

The present book has as its expressed aim the vanquishing of four myths:

Mathematicians are different from other people, lacking emotional complexity. Mathematics is a solitary pursuit. Mathematics is a young man’s game. Mathematics is an effective filter for higher education.

More generally, the book

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September 23rd, 2011 | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed

Where is everybody?

[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]

Introduction

During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?”

Behind Fermi’s question was this line of reasoning: Since there are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, and since in a few tens of thousand of years at most they

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September 9th, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed