University of Newcastle mathematician and Laureate Professor Jonathan Borwein is one of 17 scientists across Australia in 2010 to be elected to the Fellowship of the prestigious Academy of Science.
The Fellowship comprises Australia’s top scientists, recognised for research that has had a profound impact on the world’s scientific knowledge in fields including medicine, physics, mathematics and engineering. Laureate Professor Borwein is internationally recognised for his contribution to mathematics and computing education, and research in each of pure, applied and computational mathematics as well as high-performance computing.
For additional details see Announcement.
March 29. Borwein participated in the Distinguished Lecturer Series in Mathematics and Applications at the University of South Australia, speaking on “Entropy and Projection Methods for Inverse Problems”. For details, see Announcement and Abstract.
Abstract: I shall discuss in “tutorial mode” the formalization of inverse problems such as signal recovery and option pricing; first as (convex and non-convex) optimization problems and second as feasibility problems — over the infinite dimensional space of signals. I shall touch on the following topics (more is an unrealistic task):
1. The impact of the choice of “entropy” (e.g., Boltzmann-Shannon,Burg entropy, Fisher information) on
Continue reading Borwein participates in Distinguished Lecture Series at University of South Australia
On 8 Mar 2010 Jonathan M. Borwein gave the First Plenary Lecture on “Exploratory Experimentation and Computation” (Lecture) at the 2010 German Mathematical Society meetings in Munich. An associated paper, co-authored with David H. Bailey, is here: PDF.
Abstract:
The mathematical research community is facing a great challenge to re-evaluate the role of proof in light of the growing power of current computer systems, of modern mathematical computing packages, and of the growing capacity to data-mine on the Internet. Add to that the enormous complexity of many modern capstone results such as the Poincaré conjecture, Fermat’s last theorem, and
Continue reading Borwein gives lecture “Exploratory Experimentation and Computation”
Jonathan M. Borwein of the University of Newcastle (NSW, Australia) and Jon D. Vanderwerff of La Sierra University (California, USA) have published a new book “Convex Functions: Constructions, Characterizations and Counterexamples.” CARMA site | CUP site. Synopsis:
Like differentiability, convexity is a natural and powerful property of functions that plays a significant role in many areas of mathematics, both pure and applied. It ties together notions from topology, algebra, geometry and analysis, and is an important tool in optimization, mathematical programming and game theory. This book, which is the product of a collaboration of over 15 years, is unique in
Continue reading Borwein and Jon Vanderwerff publish “Convex Functions”
On 3 Mar 2010 David H. Bailey of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gave a “distinguished seminar” at the University of Delaware entitled “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific Discovery.” The full lecture is available here: Online presentation.
Abstract:
The latest state-of-the-art scientific computer systems have achieved over 1 “Pflop/s” (one million billion floating-point arithmetic operations per second). Scientists have capitalized on this computational power by developing a wide range of sophisticated programs that are becoming so effective that scientific computing is now widely regarded as the third mode of scientific discovery, after theory and experiment.
In other words, the
Continue reading Bailey gives lecture “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific Discovery”
News Flash: CNN’s online Tech Report mentions David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein in a feature article on Pi Day (Mar 14). New Scientist also published an article on Pi Day:
Elizabeth Landau, “On Pi Day, one number ‘reeks of mystery’,” CNN, 12 Mar 2010, available at Online article. Jacob Aron, “Pi day: Five tasty facts about the famous ratio,” New Scientist, 12 Mar 2010, available at Online article.
Also of interest for Pi Day are:
Jonathan Borwein’s talk and accompanying article, “The Life of Pi”: Online presentation | Online article. The Pi Day site of the Mathematical Association
Continue reading CNN Pi Day article mentions David Bailey, Jon Borwein and Peter Borwein
Copyright law has always been a confusing arena, but recent developments have grave future consequences.
We begin by noting that most of the world lives under different copyright laws: European Union, Commonwealth, Japanese, and other dispensations differ widely. See the CEIC’s writings for a record of details relevant to mathematical publishing. For instance, under Canadian copyright law, known as “Cancopy,” library use often generates royalties which the government gave away to publishers without individual ability to demur. Margaret Atwood does see them; small fish do not. Originally copyright was the concern of printers eager to protect their investment.
Continue reading The confusing morass of copyright laws
[This is a condensed version of a paper written by one of the present bloggers (Borwein). For the full article, with references, see http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/psychology.pdf.]
Some years ago, my brother Peter surveyed other academic disciplines. He discovered that students who bitch mightily about calculus professors still prefer the relative certainty of how-and-what we teach-and-assess to the subjectivity of a creative writing course or the rigors of a physics or chemistry laboratory course. Similarly, while I have met my share of micro-managing Deans–who view mathematics with disdain when they look at the size of our research grants or the infrequency of our
Continue reading The psychology of mathematics
Forget the ‘precautionary principle.’ The amount of risk to which the public should be exposed is greater than zero. —Michael Krauss, Financial Post, June 20, 2008.
Almost without exception the critical or contentious issues of our times involve numbers–even “intelligent design” advocates usually try to juggle inconvenient dates or data. Errors with numbers are ubiquitous. Sometimes these are amusing as with:
Ideal Toy Company stated on the package of the original Rubik cube that there were more than three billion possible states the cube could attain. It’s analogous to MacDonald’s proudly announcing that they’ve sold more
Continue reading Numeracy, relative risk and public policy
Semiotic fiddling while a digital Rome burns
“So to summarise, according to the citation count, in order of descent, the authors are listening to themselves, dead philosophers, other specialists in semiotic work in mathematics education research, other mathematics education research researchers and then just occasionally to social scientists but almost never to other education researchers, including mathematics teacher education researchers, school teachers and teacher educators. The engagement with Peirce is being understood primarily through personal engagements with the original material rather than as a result of working through the filters of history, including those evidenced within mathematics education
Continue reading Semiotic fiddling while a digital Rome burns
|
|