Many are familiar with the old and amusing puzzle “As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives…” Recently scholars examining the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (c. 1650 BCE) were started to find a surprisingly similar version: Seven houses have seven cats that each eat seven mice that each eat seven grains of barley. Each barley grain would have produced seven hekat of grain. (One hekat was roughly 1.3 gallons.) So how many total items are described? Answer: 19,607.
The Rhind papyrus, which dates to 1650 B.C., is one of several papyri exhibiting ancient Egypt’s mathematical
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Those readers in the New York City area might like to pay a visit to NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Its museum is currently displaying an exhibit of Babylonian mathematical artifacts, gleaned from the collections of Columbia University, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, dated from 1900 to 1700 BCE. The artifacts include many items entirely familiar to the modern age — student exercises, word problems and calculation tables.
By examining these tablets, scholars have been also to decipher the Babylonian schemes for performing arithmetic. They have shown that the Babylonians used the same symbol to
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Two developments, one in the U.K. and one in the U.S., presage serious difficulties for science funding and indeed the future of scientific research worldwide.
In the U.K., Business Secretary Vince Cable announced this week that he wants to “ration” British science. The proposal is to eliminate the 46% of U.K. research that is not defined as “world class.” Numerous political analysts, not to mention research scientists, are dumbfounded at this development. The announcement appears to suggest that Cable, and others in his ministry, are unaware of the extent to which U.K. research projects are already sifted by a very
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At the upcoming meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, Prof. Jonathan Borwein will give a plenary talk on the mathematics of uniform random walks. This is in addition to the public lecture The Life of Pi.
Abstract:
Following Pearson in 1905, we study the expected distance of a two-dimensional walk in the plane with n unit steps in random directions — what Pearson called a random walk or a “ramble”. While the statistics and large n behaviour are well understood, the precise behaviour of the first few steps is quite remarkable and less tractable. Series evaluations and recursions are obtained
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The 2010 meeting of the International Mathematical Union is being held in Hyderabad, India. At this meeting, Ingrid Daubechies (of wavelet fame) was appointed President, the first woman ever afforded than honor. Also at this meeting the Fields Medal, long regarded as the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, was awarded to four mathematicians:
Elon Lindenstrauss, of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, received the award for “far-reaching advances in ergodic theory,” namely the study of random processes and the statistical behavior of dynamical systems. Lindenstrauss has achieved progress in what is known as the Littlewood conjecture. Ngô Bo Châu, of Université
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In honor of Jonathan Borwein’s 60th birthday in May 2011, a workshop on “Computational and Analytical Mathematics” will be held at the IRMACS Center of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Here is a synopsis of the upcoming meeting, taken from SFU conference announcement:
Having authored more than a dozen books and more than 300 publications, Jonathan Borwein is one of the most productive Canadian mathematicians ever. His research spans pure, applied, and computational mathematics as well as high performance computing. His research continues to have enormous impact: MathSciNet lists more than 2500 citations by more than 1250 authors,
Continue reading Workshop to honor Jonathan Borwein’s 60th birthday
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