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[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]
Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet few are very good at it, and there are significant consequences to the public’s collective inability to accurately assess risk.
As a first and very important example, most people presume, as an indisputable fact, that the past century has been the most violent in all history — two devastating world wars, the Holocaust, the Rawanda massacre, the September 11 attacks and more — and that
Continue reading Innumeracy and public risk
In two articles [BaiBor2011a; BaiBor2011b], two earlier blog posts [BlogA; BlogB] and a Conversation piece, we have examined the discovery and development of our modern system of decimal arithmetic with zero, which discovery we believe to be among the greatest of all historical mathematical achievements. It is certainly nontrivial, as evidenced by the fact that it escaped even Archimedes, that extraordinary genius of the ~300 BCE Greek culture who anticipated much of modern mathematics, including numerical analysis and calculus. And the impact of this ingenious discovery in our modern computer-oriented society cannot be overstated.
One key aspect of this history
Continue reading That mysterious but important number zero
In response to the use of citation data in research assessments such as Excellence in Research for Australia, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) are considering producing a mathematics journal rating system to mitigate the exploitation of commercial or national rating methods, see also the 2008 citations report and the 2010 best practice report. They write:
In implementation of Resolution 18 adopted by the IMU General Assembly in 2010: “The General Assembly of the IMU asks the EC to create, in cooperation with ICIAM, a Working Group that is charged with
Continue reading Proposed mathematical journal rating system
[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]
From time to time, the scientific community is rocked with cases of scientific fraud. Needless to say, such incidents do not help instill confidence in the public mind that is already predisposed to be skeptical of inconvenient scientific findings, including biological evolution and global warming.
One notable case of fraud came to light in 2002, when Bell Labs researcher Hendrik Schon, once described as a “rising star” in the field of nanoelectronics, was accused of
Continue reading Mathematics and scientific fraud
An article entitled “Exploratory Experimentation and Computation,” authored by the present bloggers, has appeared in the November 2011 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The full PDF of the article is available Here. The article has been highlighted in a number of press reports, including: LBNL News, Science Daily, Eurekalert, Physorg, Newswise, and Others.
Here is an excerpt from the LBNL News report:
A common misperception is that mathematicians’ work consists entirely of calculations. If that were true, computers would have replaced mathematicians long ago. What mathematicians actually do is to discover and investigate patterns—patterns that arise
Continue reading “Exploratory Experimentation and Computation” published in AMS Notices
[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]
Introduction
Many of us know that the sun is approximately 150 million km or 93 million miles away, a distance that is known as the “astronomical unit” (AU). Neptune, the most distant planet, is 30 AU from the sun, or some 44.8 billion km (27.9 billion mi). The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, reached Jupiter just two years later, but did not reach Neptune until 1989.
The nearest stars, Alpha Centauri A-B and Proxima
Continue reading How far away is everybody?
Professor Jonathan M. Borwein delivered the keynote talk Teaching and Researching with Collaboration Tools and Technology as part of the 2011 Australian Learning and Teaching Council workshop, “Effective Teaching, Effective Learning in the Quantitative Disciplines,” held 29-30 Sep 2011 at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. This practical, hands-on and interactive workshop immediately followed the Australian Mathematical Society 55th Annual Meeting at the University of Wollongong (26-29 September, 2011). It has been designed specifically for lecturers and tutors teaching in the quantitative disciplines.
Additional details can be found at ALTC Workshop website.
Loving and Hating Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2010) is the child of two passionate scholars: a mathematician (Reuben Hersh) and a social scientist (Vera John-Steiner). Reuben Hersh has written for many articles for the Intelligencer, as well as earlier books such as The Mathematical Experience, coauthored with Davis and Marchisotto, and What is Mathematics Really?.
The present book has as its expressed aim the vanquishing of four myths:
Mathematicians are different from other people, lacking emotional complexity. Mathematics is a solitary pursuit. Mathematics is a young man’s game. Mathematics is an effective filter for higher education.
More generally, the book
Continue reading Review of “Loving and Hating Mathematics”
[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]
Introduction
During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?”
Behind Fermi’s question was this line of reasoning: Since there are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, and since in a few tens of thousand of years at most they
Continue reading Where is everybody?
The Conversation, an online forum from the Australian academic research community and aimed at the interested public, has featured an essay written by the present bloggers. Entitled “Magic numbers: the beauty of decimal notation,” it is available here: Conversation article.
This piece briefly mentions the history of positional decimal arithmetic, from its original discovery by unknown Indian mathematicians approximately 2000 years ago, to its modern incarnation (at least in binary) in computers. The article then speculates how history may have changed if either arithmetic had been discovered earlier, or it had been communicated to Greek mathematicians such as Archimedes.
It
Continue reading Magic numbers
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