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On 3 Mar 2010 David H. Bailey of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gave a “distinguished seminar” at the University of Delaware entitled “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific Discovery.” The full lecture is available here: Online presentation.
Abstract:
The latest state-of-the-art scientific computer systems have achieved over 1 “Pflop/s” (one million billion floating-point arithmetic operations per second). Scientists have capitalized on this computational power by developing a wide range of sophisticated programs that are becoming so effective that scientific computing is now widely regarded as the third mode of scientific discovery, after theory and experiment.
In other words, the
Continue reading Bailey gives lecture “Computing as the Third Mode of Scientific Discovery”
News Flash: CNN’s online Tech Report mentions David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein in a feature article on Pi Day (Mar 14). New Scientist also published an article on Pi Day:
Elizabeth Landau, “On Pi Day, one number ‘reeks of mystery’,” CNN, 12 Mar 2010, available at Online article. Jacob Aron, “Pi day: Five tasty facts about the famous ratio,” New Scientist, 12 Mar 2010, available at Online article.
Also of interest for Pi Day are:
Jonathan Borwein’s talk and accompanying article, “The Life of Pi”: Online presentation | Online article. The Pi Day site of the Mathematical Association
Continue reading CNN Pi Day article mentions David Bailey, Jon Borwein and Peter Borwein
Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the fact that some errors were found in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, and the fact that, as revealed in a set of emails exchanged by some leading climate scientists in the U.K., the report had been “dressed” to some extent. Many now claim that there is a full-scale conspiracy of the scientific world to hide the “truth” from the public, a view now apparently held by 16% of Americans, according to a recent poll [Broder; Vanderhooft].
Similar claims have been made about modern evolutionary biology. The recent movie
Continue reading Creationism, global warming denial, and scientific integrity
Introduction
Question: What mathematical discovery more than 1500 years ago:
Is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single discovery in the field of mathematics? Involved three subtle ideas that evaded the greatest minds of antiquity, even including geniuses such as Archimedes? Was fiercely resisted in Europe for hundreds of years after its discovery? Even today, in historical treatments of mathematics, is often dismissed with scant mention, or else is ascribed to the wrong source?
Answer: Our modern system of positional decimal arithmetic with zero, which was discovered in India in the fourth or fifth century.
Why?
Continue reading The greatest mathematical discovery?
Copyright law has always been a confusing arena, but recent developments have grave future consequences.
We begin by noting that most of the world lives under different copyright laws: European Union, Commonwealth, Japanese, and other dispensations differ widely. See the CEIC’s writings for a record of details relevant to mathematical publishing. For instance, under Canadian copyright law, known as “Cancopy,” library use often generates royalties which the government gave away to publishers without individual ability to demur. Margaret Atwood does see them; small fish do not. Originally copyright was the concern of printers eager to protect their investment.
Continue reading The confusing morass of copyright laws
The latest results for math and science education in first-world nations such as the U.S., the major European nations, and Australia are not particularly encouraging. In the following table, the first two columns contain the latest results from the “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS) for Grade Four and Grade Eight, respectively [Institute2009], while the third column contains rankings of math performance among 15-year-olds in a separate study by the OECD [OECD2003]:
Grade Four TIMSS Rankings
Hong Kong (607) Singapore (599) Chinese Taipei (576) Japan (568) Kazakhstan (549) Russian Federation (544) England (541) Latvia (537)
Continue reading Sad state of math and science education
[This is a condensed version of a paper written by one of the present bloggers (Borwein). For the full article, with references, see http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/psychology.pdf.]
Some years ago, my brother Peter surveyed other academic disciplines. He discovered that students who bitch mightily about calculus professors still prefer the relative certainty of how-and-what we teach-and-assess to the subjectivity of a creative writing course or the rigors of a physics or chemistry laboratory course. Similarly, while I have met my share of micro-managing Deans–who view mathematics with disdain when they look at the size of our research grants or the infrequency of our
Continue reading The psychology of mathematics
John D. Barrow, New Theories of Everything, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Both of the present bloggers have enjoyed Barrow’s previous works. Bailey was so enthralled with Barrow and Tipler’s 1988 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle that he read every word of its 736 pages multiple times. Borwein (with his brother Peter) wrote a favorable review of Barrow’s 1992 book Pi in the Sky for the publication Science.
Barrow’s latest book, New Theories of Everything, does not disappoint. In this wide-ranging work, Barrow examines the notion of viewing science as the search for algorithmic compression of observed data. In other words,
Continue reading John D. Barrow’s “New Theories of Everything”
Recently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a very interesting, in-depth article on the recent economic collapse and economists’ part in the failure. His full article (which we highly recommend) can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html
Krugman’s introduction presents a valuable synopsis of the problem:
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories
Continue reading How did the economists get it so wrong?
It often comes as a shock to professional scientists to learn that a large fraction of the public rejects much if not all of the evolutionary framework of modern geology and biology. For example, in a recent poll, 44% of Americans surveyed agreed that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years [Gallup]. Another indication of the popularity of this worldview, often termed “young-earth creationism”, is the fact that over 700,000 Americans have attended the “Creation Museum” near Cincinnati, Ohio since its opening in 1977. Displays at the museum insist
Continue reading Misuse of probability by “creation scientists”
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