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David H. Bailey will present three talks in Spain in June 2010:
“High-Precision Computation: Mathematical Physics and Dynamics,” Joint SIAM/RSME-SCM-SEMA Meeting on Emerging Topics in Dynamical Systems and Partial Differential Equations, University of Catalona, Barcelona, Spain (June 2010) PDF
“Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific and Mathematical Discovery,” Barcelona Supercomputer Center (3 Jun 2010): PDF “High-Precision, Highly Parallel Numerical Integration,” University of Zaragoza (Dept. of Mathematics), Zaragoza, Spain, invited seminar (Jun 2010), PDF
A workshop on the Sage mathematical software system will be presented at the upcoming MAA MathFest in Pittsburgh, PA (5-7 Aug 2010):
“Hands-On Explorations in Algebra and Combinatorics”
Neal Calkin, Clemson University Dan Warner, Clemson University
Part 1: Tuesday, August 3, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Reception: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Part 2: Wednesday, August 4, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
In recent years, a new piece of mathematical software has appeared on the scene: Sage (www.sagemath.org) is an open source package capable of doing high-powered symbolic and numerical computations. It features a web-based notebook interface, local or remote
Continue reading Short course on Sage at Pittsburg MathFest
[This article has also been posted Here.]
A large fraction of the public still does not accept the most basic facts of modern geology, such as the notion that the earth is many millions of years old. For example, fully 45 percent of Americans insist that the earth was created at some time within the past 10,000 years [Gallup2004].
Much of this skepticism stems from the creationist movement, which has gone to great lengths to criticize the radiometric methods used to date rocks and fossils, such as Carbon-14, Rb-Sr and the K-Ar methods. Creationists cite “anomalies” that have
Continue reading How reliable are the radiometric methods used for geologic ages?
In the summer of 1950, while having lunch with colleagues who were chatting about recent reports of “flying saucers” in the news, nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?” [Web2002, pg. 17-18]. Behind his question was the following line of reasoning: (a) There are likely many other technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy; (b) It is highly likely that other technological civilizations are many thousands of years more advanced than us (since if they are less advanced by even a few decades they would not be technological); (c) In a few million years, they could have
Continue reading Fermi’s Paradox and Stephen Hawking
Next week David H. Bailey of LBNL is giving the keynote speech at the “SHARCNet Research Day,” a meeting of researchers affiliated with Canada’s leading high-performance computing network. This will be held 6 May 2010 at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The talk is entitled “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific and Mathematical Discovery”. It gives an overview of the many components of modern high-performance computing (hardware, software, algorithms, numerical techniques, parallelization techniques, etc), which the speaker likens to a “Symphony.” Here is the announcement: SHARCNet meeting
Abstract:
The latest state-of-the-art scientific computer systems have achieved over 1
Continue reading Bailey to give keynote speech at SHARCNet Research Day
Our colleague Steven Strogatz has written a series of articles on mathematics, targeted to a “lay” reader, for the “Opinionator” series of the New York Times. Stogratz’s latest article reconstructs Archimedes’ discovery of how pi can be seen to be a limit of areas of inscribed and circumscribed polygons: Strogatz article on limits.
Strogatz’s other articles can be read here: Strogatz math articles.
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”
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