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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
Continue reading Supercomputers analyze cosmic microwave background data
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
Continue reading Workshop on reliability in mathematical computing
Introduction
On February 21, 2013, the city council of Sebastopol, California (a small suburb north of San Francisco) adopted a resolution attempting to ban the installation of smart meters by Pacific Gas and Electric, claiming that the devices pose “potential risks to the health, safety and welfare of Sebastopol residents.” In taking this measure, Sebastpol officials followed the lead of Marin County (hardly a traditional bastion of conservative pseudoscience), which in 2011 passed a similar resolution. To date, PG&E has ignored both, claiming that only California’s Public Utilities Commission has jurisdiction in the matter, but debate continues at several levels.
Continue reading Smart meters, dumb science
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
Continue reading In Memoriam: Robert R. Phelps (1926-2013)
Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet very few receive any formal training in the requisite mathematics and statistics, and, partly as a result, many poor decisions are being made, both by individuals and governmental bodies. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that we may be neurologically ill-equipped to make the sort of decisions called for by modern society. Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes it clear in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that making careful (slow) judgements is a very complicated mental process.
For example, many have presumed that in the wake of
Continue reading Scientific nonsense and relative risk
It has been conventional wisdom that computing is the “third leg” of the stool of modern science, complementing theory and experiment. But that metaphor is no longer accurate. Instead, computing now pervades all of science, including theory and experiment. Nowadays massive computation is required just to reduce and analyze experimental data, and simulations and computational explorations are employed in fields as diverse as climate modeling and research mathematics.
Unfortunately, the culture of scientific computing has not kept pace with its rapidly ascending pre-eminence in the broad domain of scientific research. In experimental research work, researchers are taught early the importance
Continue reading Set the default to “open”: Reproducible science in the computer age
An article co-authored by Jonathan M. Borwein and the late Richard E. Crandall on closed forms has appeared in the January 2013 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. This article tries to answer the question “What is a closed form,” and then explains why obtaining a closed-form expression for a mathematical entity (as opposed, say, to a numerical value) is so important.
The full PDF of the article is available Here.
Here is the introductory paragraph of the article:
Mathematics abounds in terms that are in frequent use yet are rarely made precise. Two such are rigorous
Continue reading Borwein-Crandall article on closed forms appears
Scientists are sometimes pictured by the media, or even by antagonists such as creationists, as completely resolute and inflexible with regards to their theories and assertions. But this is really not an accurate picture. Real scientists do change their minds, particularly when the underlying facts change. As economist John Maynard Keyes is reputed once to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (Actually, according to a columnist in the Wall Street Journal, the Keynes quote may be apocryphal, but it well illustrates our point).
An interesting illustration of a good scholar’s willingness to
Continue reading An opponent of genetically modified crops changes his mind
It is with great sadness that the present bloggers announce the passing of their dear colleague Richard Crandall, who died Thursday December 20, 2012, after a brief bout with acute leukaemia—the week before his 65th birthday on December 29.
Crandall had a long and colorful career. He was a physicist by training, studying with Richard Feynman as an undergrad at the California Institute of Technology, and receiving his Ph.D. in physics at MIT, under the tutelage of Victor Weisskopf, the Austrian-American physicist who discovered what is now known as the Lamb Shift and who was one of the most influential
Continue reading Mathematician/physicist/inventor Richard Crandall dies at 64
The latest (2011) results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which asses reading, and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which tests mathematics and science, are in, and they aren’t pretty, particularly for the U.S., Canada and Australia.
In the 4th grade PIRLS reading tests, the United States ranked an unimpressive 7th, behind Singapore, the Russian Federation, Northern Ireland, Finland, England and Hong Kong. Canada ranked even lower (11th), and Australia ranked a dismal 17th, the lowest of English-speaking nations in the list (see PIRLS, pg. 68-69).
In the 4th grade TIMSS mathematics tests,
Continue reading Alarm bells sound over latest international test scores
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