Math Drudge

Today (March 26, 2013) marks the 100th birthday of Paul Erdös, the eccentric yet beloved mathematician who died in 1996.

Paul Erdös is arguably the most prolific mathematician in history. Working in collaboration with over 500 researchers, he published in fields as diverse as combinatorics, set theory, graph theory, analytic number theory, approximation theory, ergodic theory and probability theory.

Erdös was born in Budapest on March 26, 1913, as the only surviving child of two Jewish mathematicians. His mathematical genius was evident quite early — at the age of four, he would dazzle those around him by calculating, in his

Continue reading March 26, 2013: The 100th birthday of Paul Erdös

Supercomputers in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California, have been harnessed to analyze the exploding volume of data produced by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which observes the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, a remnant of the big bang.

The Planck data analysis project was granted an unprecedented multi-year allocation of computer time on the NERSC supercomputers — tens of millions of CPU-hours, plus correspondingly large data storage and data transfer resources.

To date, the increasingly accurate measurements of the CMB radiation has

Continue reading Supercomputers analyze cosmic microwave background data