On 6 August 2010, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician working at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alo, California, distributed a note to some colleagues claiming that he had solved the “P not NP” problem, a most famous and potentially far-reaching question at the nexus of mathematics and computer science. Deolalikar’s manuscript is available here: Deolalikar paper.
The Clay Mathematics Institute describes this problem as follows (Clay):
Suppose that you are organizing housing accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the dormitory. To complicate matters,
Continue reading Has the “P not NP” problem been solved?
Prof. Jonathan Borwein of the University of Newcastle, Australia, will give the “public lecture” at the upcoming meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society on “The life of Pi.” Here are some details: Announcement
Abstract: The desire to understand pi, the challenge, and originally the need, to calculate ever more accurate values of pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, has captured mathematicians——great and less great——for many many centuries and, especially recently, pi has provided compelling examples of computational mathematics. Pi, uniquely in mathematics, is pervasive in popular culture and the popular imagination. In this lecture
Continue reading Borwein to present lecture on “The life of Pi”
Online article
Details of methods used
Synopsis:
A pair of Japanese and US computer whizzes claim to have calculated pi to five trillion decimal places — a number which if verified eclipses the previous record set by a French software engineer.
“We believe our achievement sets a new record,” Japanese system engineer Shigeru Kondo said, adding that the Frenchman’s calculation to nearly 2.7 trillion places was believed to be the previous record. …
It took 90 days to calculate pi at Kondo’s home using a desktop computer with 20 external hard disks. It ran on the operating system Windows
Continue reading Japanese and U.S. researchers compute pi to 5 trillion places
The notion that humans often take actions and pursue goals due to subconscious desires and instincts dates back to Sigmund Freud, who suggested, among other things, that repressed sexual urges underlay some human behavior. Freud’s theories were later judged unreliable and largely nonfalsifiable. In any event, until recently it was assumed that conscious decisions are essential for the mental processes involved in setting and pursuing a goal. Indeed, goal pursuit has been considered nearly synonymous with conscious thought.
But a number of recent studies suggest otherwise. In one of the first studies of this sort, some U.S. students were seated
Continue reading Latest research indicates we unconsciously pursue goals
Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman announced today that he is rejecting the $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute prize for his recent solution of the Poincare conjecture. Perelman has been quoted saying he believes his contribution in proving the conjecture was no greater than that of a U.S. mathematician named Richard Hamilton, who first suggested an approach that Perelman utilized in his solution. He also indicated that his great dislike for the “organized mathematical community” was a large factor.
For more details see: AP News report | Washington Post report | New York Times report | MAA report. A fascinating and quite
Continue reading Perelman rejects $1 million Clay award
Many readers will be familiar with the Jeopardy! television show, which is the most popular quiz show in North America. One of the present bloggers confesses to watching it almost every weekday evening when not on travel (and hardly any other television program). The other blogger is also a keen armchair contestant.
In this show, clues are presented on a video screen to the three contestants, and after Canadian host Alex Trebek completes reading the clue, contestants must first ring in with a handheld button. The first contestant to ring in then has five seconds to provide the answer, which
Continue reading IBM’s “Watson” to compete against Jeopardy champs
David H. Bailey will present three talks in Spain in June 2010:
“High-Precision Computation: Mathematical Physics and Dynamics,” Joint SIAM/RSME-SCM-SEMA Meeting on Emerging Topics in Dynamical Systems and Partial Differential Equations, University of Catalona, Barcelona, Spain (June 2010) PDF
“Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific and Mathematical Discovery,” Barcelona Supercomputer Center (3 Jun 2010): PDF “High-Precision, Highly Parallel Numerical Integration,” University of Zaragoza (Dept. of Mathematics), Zaragoza, Spain, invited seminar (Jun 2010), PDF
A workshop on the Sage mathematical software system will be presented at the upcoming MAA MathFest in Pittsburgh, PA (5-7 Aug 2010):
“Hands-On Explorations in Algebra and Combinatorics”
Neal Calkin, Clemson University Dan Warner, Clemson University
Part 1: Tuesday, August 3, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Reception: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Part 2: Wednesday, August 4, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
In recent years, a new piece of mathematical software has appeared on the scene: Sage (www.sagemath.org) is an open source package capable of doing high-powered symbolic and numerical computations. It features a web-based notebook interface, local or remote
Continue reading Short course on Sage at Pittsburg MathFest
Next week David H. Bailey of LBNL is giving the keynote speech at the “SHARCNet Research Day,” a meeting of researchers affiliated with Canada’s leading high-performance computing network. This will be held 6 May 2010 at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The talk is entitled “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific and Mathematical Discovery”. It gives an overview of the many components of modern high-performance computing (hardware, software, algorithms, numerical techniques, parallelization techniques, etc), which the speaker likens to a “Symphony.” Here is the announcement: SHARCNet meeting
Abstract:
The latest state-of-the-art scientific computer systems have achieved over 1
Continue reading Bailey to give keynote speech at SHARCNet Research Day
Our colleague Steven Strogatz has written a series of articles on mathematics, targeted to a “lay” reader, for the “Opinionator” series of the New York Times. Stogratz’s latest article reconstructs Archimedes’ discovery of how pi can be seen to be a limit of areas of inscribed and circumscribed polygons: Strogatz article on limits.
Strogatz’s other articles can be read here: Strogatz math articles.
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