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
Continue reading David Mumford receives National Medal of Science
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
Continue reading Benoit Mandelbrot dies
Using his company’s distributed computing facilities, Tsz-Wo Sze, a Yahoo! researcher, has computed a sequence of binary digits of pi beginning at the two quadrillionth binary digit of pi. This computation used Bellard’s variant of the original “BBP” formula for pi, which formula was discovered in 1996 by a computer program running the “PSLQ” integer relation algorithm.
A New Scientist article describing this computation is available here: New Scientist.
A paper written by Sze presenting the details of his computational methods and results is available here: Sze manuscript.
Additional background information on the history of pi and the BBP
Continue reading Yahoo! researcher computes binary digits of pi beginning at two quadrillionth digit
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
Continue reading Borwein to give talk on the mathematics of uniform random walks
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
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
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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
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
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