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Those readers in the New York City area might like to pay a visit to NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Its museum is currently displaying an exhibit of Babylonian mathematical artifacts, gleaned from the collections of Columbia University, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, dated from 1900 to 1700 BCE. The artifacts include many items entirely familiar to the modern age — student exercises, word problems and calculation tables.
By examining these tablets, scholars have been also to decipher the Babylonian schemes for performing arithmetic. They have shown that the Babylonians used the same symbol to
Continue reading NYU’s treasure of Babylonian mathematics
On 9 Nov 2010, the New York Times ran an interesting online feature “What’s Next in Science?”. This series of article includes predictions from a number of scientists in different fields as to what they believe will be the most significant developments of the next few years. One of these articles is by Steven Strogatz of Cornell University, who has contributed semi-popular articles in the Times before.
In this piece, he starts out with the statement
We’re going to see scientific results that are correct, that are predictive, but are without explanation. We may be able to do
Continue reading What’s next in science?
The Fourth International Workshop on Symbolic-Numeric Computation (SNC2011) will be held on 7-9 June 2011 in San Jose, California. Invited speakers include Jonathan Borwein (one of the bloggers on this site), James Demmel (an expert in numerical analysis and linear algebra at UC Berkeley) and Stephen Watt (an expert in symbolic computing at the University of Western Ontario). The conference will examine a wide range of relevant topics, including computational mathematics, numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, parallel implementations and experimental mathematics applications.
Additional details for the conference, including due dates for submission, are available at the conference website: SNC2011.
A Chinese supercomputer appears to have taken the #1 spot on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Although the final rankings of the twice-yearly published list is not yet final, Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who co-manages the Top500 list, says that “it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.” Dongarra adds that the Chinese computer, which achieved 2.5 Pflop/s (2.5 x 1015 floating-point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark, “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.”
The new system, according to a separate report by Dongarra, has 7168
Continue reading Chinese supercomputer is world’s #1 system
The present bloggers have written some new papers and presentations on pi that are targeted to a wide audience. These files are freely available for download:
David H. Bailey, “A short history of pi formulas,” manuscript, Oct 2010, available at PDF. Jonathan Borwein, “The Life of Pi,” manuscript, Sep 2010, available at PDF. Jonathan Borwein, “The Life of Pi,” presentation, Sep 2010, PDF.
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
At the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) confidently predicted a new wave of discoveries that would revolutionize technology and society. For example, Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do,” and Marvin Minsky wrote that “within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved” [Crevier1993]. Needless to say, in spite of advances in computer hardware vastly exceeding even the most optimistic predictions at the time, many of the exuberant goals
Continue reading Can machines teach themselves?
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
Two developments, one in the U.K. and one in the U.S., presage serious difficulties for science funding and indeed the future of scientific research worldwide.
In the U.K., Business Secretary Vince Cable announced this week that he wants to “ration” British science. The proposal is to eliminate the 46% of U.K. research that is not defined as “world class.” Numerous political analysts, not to mention research scientists, are dumbfounded at this development. The announcement appears to suggest that Cable, and others in his ministry, are unaware of the extent to which U.K. research projects are already sifted by a very
Continue reading Political threats to science funding
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