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## Oliver Heaviside

Surely you've heard of the physicist Maxwell, but what about Oliver Heaviside? Oliver Heaviside: A first-rate oddity.
posted by Evernix on Feb 14, 2013 - 14 comments

## OMG SCIENCE!

Henry Reich of Minute Physics shares his favorite science blogs, video channels, and other resources on the web. (Minute Physics previously)
posted by ocherdraco on Feb 8, 2013 - 5 comments

## the power and beauty of mathematics

An eternity of infinities (via)
posted by kliuless on Feb 2, 2013 - 23 comments

## Episciences Project

Tim Gowers has announced a series of arXiv overlay journals called the Episciences Project that aim to exclude existing publishers from research publication in mathematics. As arXiv overlays, the Episciences Project avoids the editing and typesetting costs that existing open-access journals pay for using article processing charges. The French Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD) is backing the remaining expenses, such as developing the platform.
posted by jeffburdges on Jan 19, 2013 - 11 comments

## Love in the Time of Neuroinformatics

"The models we discuss belong to the class of two-variable systems with one delay for which appropriate delay stabilizes an unstable steady state. We formulate a theorem and prove that stabilization takes place in our case. We conclude that considerable (meaning large enough, but not too large) values of time delay involved in the model can stabilize love affairs dynamics."
posted by bluefly on Jan 16, 2013 - 12 comments

## loop-a-doop-a, loop-a-doop-a, loop-a-doop-a, squiggly dot!

Doodle Music [slyt]
posted by ocherdraco on Jan 10, 2013 - 8 comments

## Teaching Computers to Hear Emotions

New research can detect five different emotions with 81 percent accuracy. [Additional project information].
posted by Evernix on Jan 8, 2013 - 21 comments

## Numberphile: videos about numbers and stuff

Numberphile is a website containing short videos (approx. 5-10 min.) about numbers and stuff. Mathematicians and physicists play around with the tools of their trade and explain things in simple, clear language. Learn things you didn't know you were interested in! Find out why 493-7775 is a pretty cool phone number! What's the significance of 42, anyway? What the heck is a vampire number? Why does Pac-Man have only 255 screens? Suitable for viewing by everyone from intelligent and curious middle-schoolers to math-impaired adults. Browse their YouTube channel here. (Via)
posted by BitterOldPunk on Dec 29, 2012 - 20 comments

## My God, its full of stars!

What do you get if you slice a Menger Sponge on a diagonal plane?
Watch this video to find out.
posted by thatwhichfalls on Dec 26, 2012 - 44 comments

## The Museum of Mathematics

Last night was the grand opening of the Museum of Mathematics in New York City, the only museum of its kind in North America. The video is narrated by MoMath's chief of content, mathematical sculptor George Hart (better known in some circles as Vi Hart's dad.) The sculpture of the space of three-note chords in the video is based on the work of Dmitri Tymoczko, and the lovely curved hammock of strings a visitor is sitting in at the end is a ruled quadric surface. Many more videos at the Museum of Mathematics YouTube channel. Coverage from the New Scientist. (Previously on MetaFilter.)
posted by escabeche on Dec 13, 2012 - 24 comments

## Any yokel with a computer can have a college football ranking system

He is not the only one. Computer rankings are proliferating, said Kenneth Massey, a professor of math at Carson-Newman in Jefferson City, Tenn., who has been ranking teams since 1995. “When I started, there were six or seven,” he said. “But every year, it gets bigger and bigger.” Massey currently tracks more than 100 college football rankings.

With so many competitors, what is the appeal of creating one’s own rankings?

“It’s kind of a nerdy hobby,” Massey said. “It combines sports with math and computers, three things that don’t ordinarily go together.”
posted by DynamiteToast on Dec 7, 2012 - 20 comments

## Making things with Maths

Making things with Maths (sic)
posted by Evernix on Dec 7, 2012 - 34 comments

## An example of "order out of chaos"

"Draw some random points on a piece of paper and join them up to make a random polygon. Find all the midpoints and connecting them up to give a new shape, and repeat. The resulting shape will get smaller and smaller, and will tend towards an ellipse!" [code to make this in Mathematica] [a version which allows you to watch the process step by step, with 10 vertices or 100]
posted by ocherdraco on Dec 3, 2012 - 65 comments

## direct realism

The Nature of Computation - Intellects Vast and Warm and Sympathetic: "I hand you a network or graph, and ask whether there is a path through the network that crosses each edge exactly once, returning to its starting point. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Eulerian' cycle.) Then I hand you another network, and ask whether there is a path which visits each node exactly once. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Hamiltonian' cycle.) How hard is it to answer me?" (via)
posted by kliuless on Dec 1, 2012 - 19 comments

## Math Publishing for Dummies!

Mathgen is a program to randomly generate professional-looking mathematics papers, including theorems, proofs, equations, discussion, and references. Try Mathgen for yourself! (PDF example) It’s a fork of SCIgen, a program which generates random papers in computer science. Surprisingly, Mathgen has already had it's first randomly-generated paper accepted by a "journal".
posted by DynamiteToast on Nov 20, 2012 - 51 comments

## The strange case of The Pigeon-hole Principle

It's Saturday; why not think about the pigeonhole principle? Here are problems and more problems and what you might call a problem with the principle itself as it is often stated.
posted by Wolfdog on Nov 10, 2012 - 41 comments

## Ein Beitrag zur Optik der Farbanstriche

For years now, the primary way of representing and storing color on a computer display has been to define it as existing in three dimensions: Red, Green, and Blue. What if that's wrong? “While the appearance of a color on a screen can be described in three dimensions, the blending of color actually is happening in a six dimensional space,” How Fifty-Three, developers of the iPad painting app Paper, used a theory of paint optics from 1931 to develop a better color mixer.
posted by gauche on Nov 9, 2012 - 28 comments

## The Fifth problem: Math & Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union

The Fifth Problem: "If this were a boxing match, with one of the boxers pressed in the corner, bloodied, desperately trying to hold his own against the barrage of punches falling on him (many of them below the belt, I might add), that would be the equivalent of the final, deadly, blow. The problem looked innocent enough at first glance: given a circle and two points on the plane outside the circle, construct another circle passing trough those two points and touching the first circle at one point." Edward Frenkel, now Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, details the curiously baroque way Moscow State University chose to discriminate against talented Jewish math students: By quizzing them with fiendishly difficult math problems with deceptively simple solutions that are nearly impossible to find.
posted by flug on Nov 5, 2012 - 41 comments

## Factor Conga

Animation of prime factorization of the integers based on Brent Yorgey's factorization diagrams, described here. [via Data Pointed, previously.]
posted by albrecht on Nov 1, 2012 - 35 comments

## There is Nothing New Under the Sun

She sat zazen, concentrating on not concentrating, until it was time to prepare for the appointment. Sitting seemed to produce the usual serenity, put everything in perspective. Her hand did not tremble as she applied her make-up; tranquil features looked back at her from the mirror. She was mildly surprised, in fact, at just how calm she was, until she got out of the hotel elevator at the garage level and the mugger made his play. She killed him instead of disabling him. Which was obviously not a measured, balanced action--the official fuss and paperwork could make her late. Annoyed at herself, she stuffed the corpse under a shiny new Westinghouse roadable whose owner she knew to be in Luna, and continued on to her own car. This would have to be squared later, and it would cost. No help for it--she fought to regain at least the semblance of tranquillity as her car emerged from the garage and turned north. Nothing must interfere with this meeting, or with her role in it. "Melancholy Elephants," an enthralling, Hugo Award-winning short story by Spider Robinson about a disciplined operative, a powerful senator, and a crucial mission to preserve humanity's most precious resource. (some spoilers inside)
posted by Rhaomi on Oct 27, 2012 - 14 comments

## no stairway?

Q: How many miles is it to the crab nebula? How does one even figure this out? A: The cosmic distance ladder! Here's a talk by Fields medalist Terrence Tao on methods for indirect calculation of distances to astronomical objects. Here's Tao's blog post on the subject, including the slides for the talk. And here's a Wikipedia page.
posted by kaibutsu on Oct 22, 2012 - 17 comments

## Boaler and the math wars

"Milgram and Bishop are opposed to reforms of mathematics teaching and support the continuation of a model in which students learn mathematics without engaging in realistic problems or discussing mathematical methods. They are, of course, entitled to this opinion, and there has been an ongoing, spirited academic debate about mathematics learning for a number of years. But Milgram and Bishop have gone beyond the bounds of reasoned discourse in a campaign to systematically suppress empirical evidence that contradicts their stance. Academic disagreement is an inevitable consequence of academic freedom, and I welcome it. However, responsible disagreement and academic bullying are not the same thing. Milgram and Bishop have engaged in a range of tactics to discredit me and damage my work which I have now decided to make public." Jo Boaler, professor of mathematics education at Stanford, accuses two mathematicians, one her colleague of Stanford, of unethical attempts to discredit her research, which supports "active engagement" with mathematics (aka "reform math") over the more traditional "practicing procedures" approach.
posted by escabeche on Oct 18, 2012 - 119 comments

## Smoothlife

SmoothLife is a continuous version of John Conway's Game of Life. When you tire of watching the hypnotic video you can read a technical description of SmoothLife on the arXiv. Then you can watch more videos of SmoothLife.
posted by escabeche on Oct 10, 2012 - 30 comments

## weee eigenvectors

Eigenfaces for facial recognition. (This post assumes familiarity with the terminology and notation of linear algebra, particularly inner product spaces.)
posted by Evernix on Oct 6, 2012 - 18 comments

## What is the smallest prime?

What is the smallest prime? "It seems that the number two should be the obvious answer, and today it is, but it was not always so. There were times when and mathematicians for whom the numbers one and three were acceptable answers. To find the first prime, we must also know what the first positive integer is. Surprisingly, with the definitions used at various times throughout history, one was often not the first positive integer (some started with two, and a few with three). In this article, we survey the history of the primality of one, from the ancient Greeks to modern times. We will discuss some of the reasons definitions changed, and provide several examples. We will also discuss the last significant mathematicians to list the number one as prime."
posted by escabeche on Sep 18, 2012 - 61 comments

Robert MacPherson interviewed as part of the Simons Foundation's Science Lives series. MacPherson is among the founders of the modern theory of singularities, points like a kink in a curve where the geometry of a space stops being smooth and starts behaving badly. In the interview, MacPherson talks about cultural differences between math and music, his frustration with high school math, growing up gay in the South and life as a gay man in the scientific community, smuggling $23,000 in cash into post-Soviet Russia to help mathematicians there keep the lights on, catastrophe theory, perverse sheaves, how to be a successful graduate student, stuttering, and of course the development of the intersection homology theory for which he is most well-known. posted by escabeche on Sep 12, 2012 - 5 comments ## Making Math Fun Is your elementary school youngster struggling with math? Are they a visual person? Would math games and videos help them learn? Enter Math Playground, to assist with problem solving and real world math. Try the enticing logic game Sugar, Sugar or beef up your math word problem skills. There are plenty of games to help educate while entertaining. posted by netbros on Sep 4, 2012 - 14 comments ## I ♥ Cardioids I ♥ Cardioids, Vi Hart's condensed awesome tackles parabolas, cardioids, circles and more. Related: Part 1 of Rolling Circles and Balls. posted by odinsdream on Aug 31, 2012 - 24 comments ## While almost unknown to Americans, many Europeans have treasured these portraits Cliff Stoll makes glass Klein bottles. He also sells imported portraits of Gauss. posted by madcaptenor on Aug 29, 2012 - 26 comments ## To Infinity and Somewhat Past That! Are there as many odd numbers as there are all numbers? Can one infinity be bigger than another? TED Ed and Minute Physics both take a look at some of the mind boggling realities of Infinity. posted by quin on Aug 28, 2012 - 148 comments ## William Thurston "The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others." William Thurston, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, has died. He revolutionized topology and geometry, insisting always that geometric intuition and understanding played just as important a role in mathematical discovery as did the austere formalism championed by the school of Grothendieck. Thurston's views on the relation between mathematical understanding and formal proof are summed up in his essay "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics." posted by escabeche on Aug 22, 2012 - 32 comments ## The Cause of the Formation of Meanders in the Courses of Rivers and of the So-Called Baer’s Law Einstein described the "Tea Leaf Paradox" (more) to explain Baer's Law of erosion. posted by Algebra on Aug 19, 2012 - 9 comments ## bons mots, poems, math, knitting and logic Entertaining, collected bon mots and surprisingly interesting, collected poems by various authors. From a likable math brainiac's site, Dr T.E. Forster, a Cambridge University lecturer. He also knits and writes about Buddhist logic [pdf]. Bonus, there's a fun gif. posted by nickyskye on Aug 16, 2012 - 4 comments ## Fun with kinematics! Racetrack is a game with very simple rules which nonetheless does a surprisingly good job of simulating the acceleration, braking, and handling of a race car. It can teach not only about inertia and kinematics, but also about optimal racing lines. Racetrack can be played with nothing more than a piece of graph paper and a pen, but there is also an online implementation called Vector Racer. posted by 256 on Aug 11, 2012 - 42 comments ## "Your argument has to be beautiful." Paul Lockhart, author of the famous Mathematician's Lament, has a new book coming out called Measurement, which tries to discuss mathematics "as an artful way of thinking and living". Lockhart discusses his passion for math and motives for writing the book in this video. posted by Rory Marinich on Jul 31, 2012 - 17 comments ## Win with mathb.in! "MathB.in is a website meant for sharing snippets of mathematical text with others on the web. This is a pastebin for mathematics… The post can be composed in a mixture of plain text, LaTeX and HTML." posted by grouse on Jul 26, 2012 - 5 comments ## noncommutative balls in boxes Morton and Vicary on the Categorified Heisenberg Algebra - "In quantum mechanics, position times momentum does not equal momentum times position! This sounds weird, but it's connected to a very simple fact. Suppose you have a box with some balls in it, and you have the magical ability to create and annihilate balls. Then there's one more way to create a ball and then annihilate one, than to annihilate one and then create one. Huh? Yes: if there are, say, 3 balls in the box to start with, there are 4 balls you can choose to annihilate after you've created one but only 3 before you create one..." posted by kliuless on Jul 21, 2012 - 78 comments ## Piaget Beer Gauge The Piaget Beer Gauge - a product to clear up visual misunderstandings about height and volume in American bars. posted by Greg Nog on Jul 19, 2012 - 193 comments ## Why Johnny Can’t Add Without a Calculator Slate: Technology is doing to math education what industrial agriculture did to food: making it efficient, monotonous, and low-quality. posted by beisny on Jun 30, 2012 - 70 comments ## The Art of π, φ and e The Art of π, φ and e posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jun 26, 2012 - 24 comments ## Linear Programming Will Save Us From the Invisible Hand As part of Crooked Timber's Seminar on Francis Spufford's work of speculative fiction "Red Plenty." Cosma Shalizi has posted "7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory." posted by JPD on May 30, 2012 - 24 comments ## Big (and small) Numbers FatFonts creates numerical fonts where the amount of ink/pixels for each number is in direct proportion to its value. posted by fearfulsymmetry on May 14, 2012 - 23 comments ## Cool Math Conundrums In Russian roulette, is it best to go first? | The Mathematics of Tetris | What is the result of infinity minus infinity? posted by Foci for Analysis on May 14, 2012 - 30 comments ## Sure it's irrational! Just look! Geometrically the irrationality of the square root of 2 means that there is no integer-by-integer square whose area is twice the area of another integer-by-integer square. A visual proof that the square root of 2 is irrational (not found in previous visual proof post.) posted by Obscure Reference on May 9, 2012 - 39 comments ## My Prime Factorization Sweater This is the sweater that proves that I am a Certified Math Nut. posted by Foci for Analysis on Apr 29, 2012 - 54 comments ## Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix$1 Million Challenge

Why Netflix never implemented the algorithm that won the Netflix \$1 Million Challenge.
posted by reenum on Apr 18, 2012 - 45 comments

## Ice

Ice
posted by jjray on Apr 15, 2012 - 33 comments

## How to quantify all aspects of society

"Samuel Arbesman is a senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and author of the forthcoming book 'The Half-Life of Facts'. His research and essays explore how to quantify all aspects of society."
posted by knile on Apr 10, 2012 - 4 comments

## The mathematical modelling of popular games by Nick Berry

H _ _ _ m _ n, Y a _ _ _ e e, _ _ t t _ _ _ h i p, _ h u t _ s & L a _ _ e r _ , R _ _ k , _ _ n d y _ _ _ _ , and _ _ r t s.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear on Apr 7, 2012 - 28 comments

## A snack of classical mechanics

What is the Dzhanibekov effect? Known as the Tennis Racket theorem in English and documented by Vladimir Dzhanibekov in 1985 space, it is the result of unstable rotation about a principle axis.
posted by Algebra on Apr 6, 2012 - 21 comments

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