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The 1996 Sokal hoax
Readers may be aware of the 1996 “Sokal hoax,” wherein Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, wrote a parody of a postmodern science article, entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, and submitted it to Social Text, a prominent journal in the postmodern studies field. The article was filled with page after page of erudite-sounding nonsense, political rhetoric, irrelevant references to arcane scientific concepts and approving quotations from leading postmodern science scholars. In spite of its severe flaws, the article was not only accepted for the journal, but it appeared
Continue reading Brown, Sokal and Friedman on nonsense in psychology
A bumper sticker sometimes seen on automobiles in North America and elsewhere proclaims, “I may be slow, but I’m ahead of you.” Similarly, perhaps the only positive note that can be sounded on a recent Australian science literacy survey is that the results are somewhat better than a similar study done in the U.S.A.
Results of science literacy survey
The survey, which is described in detail at the Australian Academy of Science website, asked a handful of questions on basic science. It is similar to a survey conducted in Australia in 2010, and is based on a 2009 survey conducted
Continue reading Getting it wrong: Australian science literacy hits new low
Number Theory and Related Fields
In Memory of Alf van der Poorten
Series: Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, Vol. 43
Borwein, Jonathan M.; Shparlinski, Igor; Zudilin, Wadim (Eds.) 2013, X, 395 p. 8 illus. ISBN 978-1-4614-6642-0
Collects contributions based on the proceedings of “International Number Theory Conference in Memory of Alf van der Poorten” These proceedings present high quality research articles and comprehensive surveys from distinguished mathematicians in order to promote number theory and related topics The subjects of these articles and surveys are inspired by Alf van der Poorten’s wide area of research interests, including number theory,
Continue reading Number Theory and Related Fields
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is a bit like the weather. Everybody talks about the topic but nobody does anything much about it. Sure students are admonished not to and punished when caught; but that is about it, other than out-sourcing much of the issue to money-making outfits like turnitin.com. There are many reasons for this and I intend to discuss a few of them.
The Oxford dictionary defines plagiarism as a noun for “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own” and gives the example of usage “there were accusations of plagiarism.”
Continue reading Plagiarism is a symptom not a disease
The scientific world is suffering through a rash of examples of the sad consequences of the “hype now, hide later” approach to scientific news.
Stem cell breakthrough?
On 15 May 2013, a team of researchers from Portland, Oregon, Boston, Massachusetts, Thailand and South Korea announced in the journal Cell that they had succeeded in producing personalized human embryonic stem cells, which in theory could be used to produce any component of a human body. Other researchers in the field praised the work. Dieter Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation described the work as “fantastic.”
The media coverage has
Continue reading Hype now, hide later: No way to do scientific research
During the past two weeks, two truly major results were announced in the realm of (analytic) number theory, namely the mathematics of integers in general and of prime numbers in particular. Prime numbers, i.e., 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 … are the building blocks of arithmetic and have been studied seriously since before the time of Euclid (c. 300 BCE), when it was already proven that the primes were infinite in number.
Problems about prime numbers are fundamental and often intractible. In his article “The first 50 million prime numbers” in the Mathematical Intelligencer (1977), Don
Continue reading Two breakthrough results in number theory
Frank W.J. Olver died in Rockville, Maryland, on April 23, 2013, at the age of 88. He was a world-renowned applied mathematician and one of the most widely recognized contemporary scholars in the mathematical field of special functions.
Born in Croydon, England, Olver received B.Sc, M.SC and D.SC degrees in mathematics from the University of London in 1945, 1948 and 1961. During this period he was a founding member of the Mathematics Division and became Head of the Numerical Methods Section at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, U.K.
At the invitation of Milton Abramowitz, Olver came to the
Continue reading Frank W.J. Olver (1924-2013)
Niels Henrik Abel
On the segment of Jeopardy! (the popular North American quiz show with a long-time Canadian host that is watched around the English speaking world) that aired on 9 May 2013, as part of the Jeopardy! College Tournament, featured a category “The Abel Prize.”
As the first clue of the five explained, the Abel Prize, founded in 2003, is considered to be the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics.
The Abel prize is structured in much the same way as the Nobel prizes and has already honored some of the most distinguished mathematicians of our time.
As Wikipedia
Continue reading The Abel Prize on Jeopardy!
The Australian government’s ironic and perverse decision to better fund schools at the expense of already-promised university funding would make a good Yes, Prime Minister episode. Sadly such colossal stupidity is no laughing matter.
The UK’s coalition government seems similarly intent on damaging its University sector with huge increases in fees. In California, the best state University system in the world (including Berkeley and UCLA) has been severely strained with budget cuts.
The U.S. Congress managed to pass a measure to finance the US federal government through the end of the fiscal year. But the Senate version included an amendment
Continue reading The mad politics of science funding
Kenneth Appel, who along with Wolgang Haken, in 1976 gave the first proof of the four-color theorem, died on 19 April 2013, at the age of 80.
Appel was employed as an actuary and also served in the U.S. Army before completing his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1959. After working for a few years at the Institute for Defense Analyses, in 1969 he joined the University of Illinois, where he did research in group theory and the theory of computation.
A four-coloring of the 50 U.S. states
The four-color theorem is the assertion that, under certain reasonable conditions
Continue reading The colorful life of the four-color theorem: A tribute to Kenneth Appel
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