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Jeopardy! is arguably the most popular North American trivia quiz show. Traditionally the show has shied away from mathematical topics, but, in the past year or two, it has featured some interesting and relatively sophisticated mathematical categories.
For example, on 9 May 2013, Jeopardy! featured an entire category on the Abel Prize of mathematics. A listing of the individual questions, together with some background on the Abel Prize, is available in a previous Math Drudge blog.
And, lest we forget, in February 2011 Jeopardy! featured a three-day competition between IBM’s “Watson” computer system and the two best human contestants, Ken
Continue reading Jeopardy! features a category on pi
One of the most perplexing side-effects of the Information Age is the means it unfortunately grants to many pseudo-scientific and science-denial movements to gain foothold and mutually strengthen numbers. Gone are the days when everyone would read or listen to common, well-researched, professionally written news.
Nowadays, everyone can withdraw into a self-imposed cocoon of “personalized” (and often erroneous) information. This includes big players such as Fox News — as Americans, Brits, and Australians hostage to the Murdoch empire know only too well. In reaction, liberals rely on their own reinforcement via MSNBC and similar venues.
Recently American palaeontologist Donald Prothero
Continue reading When skepticism becomes denial: The unholy alliance between science denial movements
Introduction
Once again, Texas has joined a list of U.S. states that are fighting a rear-guard war against the progress of modern science.
On September 9, 2013, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network issued a joint news release expressing alarm at comments made by members of a Texas state committee reviewing proposed science textbooks for the state. If a publisher’s textbook does not obtain the highest rating, because of ill-informed comments by the state review panel, then it is likely that the textbook will not be approved by local school districts. In fact, a sub-par
Continue reading Please mess with Texas: Texas textbook fiasco threatens US science
For many years, educators in the U.S. have been able to do little more than cry at the disappointing test scores. For example, in the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which tests mathematics and science, U.S. eighth graders ranked 11th in mathematics and 10th in science. While not disastrous, these scores are not very impressive for a nation that claims to be the world’s pre-eminent force in science and technology.
By comparison, Australian eighth graders ranked 19th in mathematics and 12th place in science. In Europe, Ireland, Belgium, Finland, England and Russia did fairly well in
Continue reading Massachusetts leads the way in science and math education
On 21 Aug 2013, at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio), an employee was struck by lightning, as he was clearing guests away from the museum’s zip line, in the wake of an approaching thunderstorm. Fortunately, the employee was not seriously injured and was quickly released from a nearby hospital.
But according to a commentary in Slate by Mark Joseph Stern, other troubles are brewing for the museum, which is operated by Answers in Genesis, a leading creationist organization headed by Ken Ham.
The Creation Museum, according to its official website, features 70,000 square feet
Continue reading Troubles beset Kentucky’s Creation Museum
Creationists on dinosaurs and dragons
On 5 Aug 2013, creationist Ken Ham addressed the issue of why dinosaurs are not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, given that, according to the creationist worldview, the earth and all its living inhabitants were created in a few days about 6000 years ago (so that dinosaurs were created with humans and must have co-existed with humans).
Ham’s view is that not only did dinosaurs co-exist with humans, they were also taken aboard Noah’s ark. He cites, for evidence, Gen. 6:19-20, where God instructed Noah to take two of every land animal onto the ark.
Continue reading Did dinosaurs live with humans? Were dragons real?
OnlineMathDegrees.org, a not-for-profit resource for students wishing to pursue a mathematics degree online, has published 101 Prime Resources on Advanced Mathematics, a useful resource with numerous web resources on mathematics education and research.
Some of the items listed include:
American Mathematical Society blogs, an interesting collection of blogs edited by Brie Finegold, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, and Evelyn Lamb, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah. Encyclopedia of Mathematics, an open-access resources covering many subdisciplines of mathematics. The Pi-Search Page, an online facility to search whether a given decimal string appears in the first 200
Continue reading 101 Prime Resources on Advanced Mathematics
Prof. Jonathan of the University of Newcastle in Australia (and one of the co-bloggers of this site) has been interviewed in International Innovation, a publication devoted to be a leading portal for scientific dissemination. Borwein’s interview, and the accompanying discussion of experimental mathematics, are available here.
Here are a few excerpts:
Borwein describes experimental applied mathematics:
Experimental applied mathematics comprises the use of modern computing technology as an active agent of research for purposes of gaining insight and intuition, discovering new patterns and relationships, testing and conjectures, and confirming analytically derived results, much in the same spirit that laboratory experimentation
Continue reading Borwein interviewed in International Innovation
Lattice Sums: Then and Now (Authors’ Website) Volume 150 of Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications J. M. Borwein, University of Newcastle, New South Wales M. L. Glasser, Clarkson University, New York R. C. McPhedran, University of Sydney J. G. Wan, Singapore University of Technology and Design I. J. Zucker, Kings College, London PUBLISHED: August 1 2013 FORMAT: Hardback ISBN: 9781107039902
From the CUP website: The study of lattice sums began when early investigators wanted to go from mechanical properties of crystals to the properties of the atoms and ions from which they were built (the literature of Madelung’s
Continue reading Lattice Sums: Then and Now
The present authors, together with Andrew Mattingly and Glenn Wightwick of IBM Australia, have published a paper on the computation of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The article is featured on the cover of the August 2013 issue.
This paper describes the computation of mathematical objects (digits of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant) that until a few years ago were widely believed in the mathematical community to be forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or calculation. In particular, the paper describes the computation of:
Base-64 digits of pi^2 beginning at position 10 trillion.
Continue reading New paper in AMS Notices on computation of pi^2 and Catalan’s constant
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