101 Prime Resources on Advanced Mathematics

OnlineMathDegrees.org, a not-for-profit resource for students wishing to pursue a mathematics degree online, has published 101 Prime Resources on Advanced Mathematics, a useful resource with numerous web resources on mathematics education and research.

Some of the items listed include:

American Mathematical Society blogs, an interesting collection of blogs edited by Brie Finegold, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, and Evelyn Lamb, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah. Encyclopedia of Mathematics, an open-access resources covering many subdisciplines of mathematics. The Pi-Search Page, an online facility to search whether a given decimal string appears in the first 200

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Borwein interviewed in International Innovation

Prof. Jonathan of the University of Newcastle in Australia (and one of the co-bloggers of this site) has been interviewed in International Innovation, a publication devoted to be a leading portal for scientific dissemination. Borwein’s interview, and the accompanying discussion of experimental mathematics, are available here.

Here are a few excerpts:

Borwein describes experimental applied mathematics:

Experimental applied mathematics comprises the use of modern computing technology as an active agent of research for purposes of gaining insight and intuition, discovering new patterns and relationships, testing and conjectures, and confirming analytically derived results, much in the same spirit that laboratory experimentation

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New paper in AMS Notices on computation of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant

The present authors, together with Andrew Mattingly and Glenn Wightwick of IBM Australia, have published a paper on the computation of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The article is featured on the cover of the August 2013 issue.

This paper describes the computation of mathematical objects (digits of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant) that until a few years ago were widely believed in the mathematical community to be forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or calculation. In particular, the paper describes the computation of:

Base-64 digits of pi^2 beginning at position 10 trillion.

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The Abel Prize on Jeopardy!

Niels Henrik Abel

On the segment of Jeopardy! (the popular North American quiz show with a long-time Canadian host that is watched around the English speaking world) that aired on 9 May 2013, as part of the Jeopardy! College Tournament, featured a category “The Abel Prize.”

As the first clue of the five explained, the Abel Prize, founded in 2003, is considered to be the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics.

The Abel prize is structured in much the same way as the Nobel prizes and has already honored some of the most distinguished mathematicians of our time.

As Wikipedia

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Supercomputers can predict stock market volatility

One of the present bloggers was mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News article on the usage of supercomputers in the financial world.

The article emphasizes that the massive flow of information in financial markets is not a particularly daunting challenge for modern high-performance computer systems, which can perform quadrillions of operations per second.

Some recent research has identified some volatility measures that, in retrospect, could have waved a “yellow flag” warning alerting market regulators of an incipient “flash crash,” such as the event that occurred on 6 May 2010, when the U.S. stock market plunged 9% overall over

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Bright prospects for careers in computing

In a Science column, Ed Lazowska, a well-known University of Washington computer scientist, discusses the future career prospects for students studying computer science. Here are a few excerpts:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that two-thirds of all available jobs in all fields of science and engineering during this decade—in the mathematical sciences, the physical sciences, the life sciences, engineering, and the social sciences—will be in computer science. …

There was an undergraduate enrollment downturn in the past decade. This was a side effect of the tech downturn. Simultaneously, there was a graduate enrollment upturn — great undergraduates chose

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

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

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Supercomputers analyze cosmic microwave background data

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

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Workshop on reliability in mathematical computing

In December, the present bloggers attended a workshop on reliability and reproducibility in computational and experimental mathematics, which was held at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. The workshop participants included a diverse group, including computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, legal scholars, journal editors and funding agencies.

We have previously posted a brief report on the workshop in a previous Math Drudge blog. This report was also published in the Huffington Post. The full report issued by the meeting organizers is available here. The meeting, and the larger themes of reliability and

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In Memoriam: Robert R. Phelps (1926-2013)

Robert Ralph Phelps born March 22, 1926 died on January 4, 2013 aged 86

After an earlier career as a radio operator in the merchant marines, Bob Phelps studied at the University of California in Los Angeles and then went on to completed a PhD from the University of Washington in 1958 under the supervision of Victor Klee. His thesis was entitled “Subreflexive normed linear spaces”. (A class of Banach spaces that disappeared when Bishop and Phelps showed all Banach spaces enjoyed this very important property!) After spending two years at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and a

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