all mathematics stories

Ancient practice sans theory

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:56:27 -0400

Move over, Archimedes. A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction.

Recent analysis of technical treatises and literary sources dating back to the fifth century B.C. reveals that technology flourished among practitioners with limited theoretical knowledge.

“Craftsmen had their own kind of knowledge that didn’t have to be based on theory,” explains Mark Schiefsky, professor of the classics in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Do sports and statistics constitute a ‘dream team’?

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:01:39 -0400

Many argue it’s the reason the curse was finally reversed. A few say it has revolutionized the game. “Sabermetrics” — the statistical analysis of baseball data — pervades sports conversation today. But how many people are aware that analytical statistics can make powerful contributions to other sports, like say, pingpong?

Mathematician Taylor wins Shaw Prize

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:47:43 -0400

Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics Richard Taylor has been awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for work that unified the diverse fields of prime numbers and symmetry.

Taylor shares the prize with Princeton Professor Robert Langlands, who initiated work in the field that was subsequently built upon by Taylor.

Children can perform approximate math without arithmetic instruction

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:10:21 -0400

Children are able to solve approximate addition or subtraction problems involving large numbers even before they have been taught arithmetic, according to a study conducted at Harvard University by researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

Bringing hard science to economics

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:01:58 -0400

Guido W. Imbens, now in his first year as a professor of economics at Harvard, was still in high school in the Netherlands when he decided to study economics. For a bright, energetic boy who had always excelled at mathematics, there was nothing dismal about the so-called "dismal science."

At Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Imbens studied econometrics, an academically rigorous combination of mathematical economics and statistics. The tools of econometrics are used to test economic theories using data, and to measure economic variables that are important for public policy.

Compared with classical mathematics, said Imbens, econometrics "appealed to me. It seemed more policy-relevant, more connected to the real world."

Medieval Islamic architecture presages 20th century mathematics

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:30:06 -0400

Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry - a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and physicists only in the 1970s and 1980s. If so, medieval Islamic application of this geometry would predate Western mastery by at least half a millennium.

The finding, by Peter J. Lu at Harvard University and Paul J. Steinhardt at Princeton University, will be published this week in the journal Science.

Yau travels down the road less taken

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:33:28 -0400

Horng-Tzer Yau's affinity for mathematics was obvious in high school, where, in his native Taiwan, he began studying advanced calculus and college algebra. He developed an interest in physics at the same time and was intrigued by relativity and quantum mechanics.

At the National Taiwan University, Yau's focus remained on mathematics. It was in Princeton University's doctoral program in the subject that, along with his enchantment for the beauty and clarity of mathematics, Yau became drawn to understand nature as well. That's when he made the decision to forge his own path to the study of natural phenomena through the study of mathematical physics.

'Armored' bubbles can exist in stable nonspherical shapes

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:43:01 -0400

Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated that gas bubbles can exist in stable non-spherical shapes without the application of external force. The micron- to millimeter-scale peapod-, doughnut-, and sausage-shaped bubbles, created by coating ordinary gas bubbles with a tightly packed layer of tiny particles and then fusing them, are described on the Web site of the journal Nature.

Born to add

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:21:54 -0400

In experiments, 5-year-olds, who had no real experience using number symbols, "added" two arrays of dots and compared them to a third array.

They are born to add

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:54:41 -0400

How does someone who hasn't learned to count yet, say a preschooler, deal with numbers? Adults are comfortable with symbols like "10" to signify 10 balloons, beeps, or beliefs. But how do kids handle numbers when they don't know numbers? Very well, according to experiments done at Harvard University.
In these experiments, 5-year-olds, who had no real experience using number symbols, "added" two arrays of dots and compared them to a third array. When researchers replaced the third array of dots with beeps, the kids integrated the sight and sound quantities easily.

The children performed all these tasks successfully, without actual counting or having any knowledge of number symbols, notes Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology who led the study.

Fryer brings mathematical economics to stubborn racial issues

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:09:56 -0400

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is a brave man.
An economist and self-described math geek, Fryer plunges fearlessly into the roiling waters of racial inequality, often surfacing with findings that contradict conventional wisdom, political correctness, and even his own life experience.

"I take stubborn old questions of racial inequality that have been around for decades and decades and try to use simple mathematics to be able to answer those questions," says Fryer, assistant professor of economics and a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. "It's a way of taking politics, taking emotion, taking anecdotes out of the study of racial inequality."

Harvard undergraduate discovers novel atomic cluster

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:15:10 -0400

Eighteen-year-old Kevin Chan, a member of the Harvard College Class of 2004, used a supercomputer to discover a novel arrangement of atoms that had been missed by other scientists studying such clusters. Chan made the unexpected discovery in late June 2001 while working on a summer project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Chan, a student majoring in mathematics, used a variation of a well-known mathematical technique to discover that 78 neutral atoms can theoretically settle into the shape of a particular "double icosahedron." Icosahedrons are 20-sided objects. Chan used a variant of a so-called "basin-hopping" algorithm developed by Robert Leary, an applied mathematician at SDSC under whom Chan worked during the summer.

Code conquers computer snoops

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:10:52 -0400

"The ingenuity of man cannot invent a code that the ingenuity of man cannot break," wrote storyteller Edgar Allan Poe, who was also an amateur cryptographer. But this is no longer true, according to Harvard researcher Michael Rabin. "All existing codes cannot be proven to be unbreakable, but for the first time we have a mathematical proof that an encryption method is [unbreakable]," he claims. "It provides everlasting security." The backbone of the code consists of a device that generates a stream of random bits of information at a prodigious rate. Anyone can receive this information, but the transmission rate is so high that storing all of it is technically unfeasible.

Simulating disease trends with massive mathematical models

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:06:21 -0400

Researcher Karen Kuntz is currently developing a model to evaluate trends in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality. Nearly 50,000 Americans die each year from the disease, despite the fact that more than half of colorectal cancers could potentially be prevented through lifestyle changes and routine screening. With such models, Kuntz and other researchers can help determine who is at risk for disease and how changes to risk factors such as diet and exercise can affect long-term health outcomes. Kuntz has worked on about a dozen health topics such as heart disease and asthma, but colorectal cancer intrigues her because it is one of the few cancers that can be staved off.

Using statistics to understand genes

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:07:23 -0400

Professor Jun Liu studies repetitive patterns in the DNA that lies between genes. This material contains instructions for regulating the expression of genes, and it is involved in whether the proteins produced by genes will become part of a brain or a big toe. These on/off switches can be found by doing difficult, time-consuming experiments that require copying and mutating genes. If a region close to a gene is mutated and the gene stops producing a certain protein, that region must be part of a genetic switch. Liu believes he can locate such switches by statistical analysis. He has made about 2,000 predictions of where switches are located in the bacterium E. coli. His predictions are 80 percent correct.