"This day may be celebrated in a variety of ways. Pause and give thought to the role that the number pi has played in your life. Imagine a world without pi. Attempt to memorise pi to as many decimal places as you can. If you're feeling creative, devise alternative values for pi. Go to a party (I will). Or just celebrate in the time-honoured fashion of ignoring Pi Approximation Day altogether."
Happy Pi Approximation Day.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Jul 23, 2009 -
55 comments
A math professor was explaining a particularly complicated calculus concept to his class when a frustrated pre-med student interrupts him. "Why do we have to learn this stuff?" the pre-med blurts out. The professor pauses, and answers matter-of-factly: "Because math saves lives." "How?" demanded the student. "How on Earth does calculus save lives?" "Because," replied the professor, "it keeps certain people out of medical school."
posted by cthuljew
on Nov 9, 2008 -
82 comments
"
Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."
Started in 2001 as a sub-section of
Maths Challenge, it has since grown large enough to become its own entity. It now boasts over 200 problems, many of them insanely difficult.
[more inside]
posted by mystyk
on Oct 13, 2008 -
31 comments
Who is Alexander Grothendieck? [PDF]
This lecture is concerned not with Grothendieck's mathematics but with his very unusual life on the fringes of human society. In particular, there is, on the one hand, the question of why at the age of forty-two Grothendieck first of all resigned his professorship at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES); then withdrew from mathematics completely; and finally broke off all connections to his colleagues, students, acquaintances, friends, as well as his own family, to live as a hermit in an unknown place. On the other hand, one would like to know what has occupied this restless and creative spirit since his withdrawal from mathematics.
posted by Wolfdog
on Aug 17, 2008 -
31 comments
Correlative Analytics -- or as O'Reilly might term the
Social Graph -- sort of mirrors the debate on 'brute force'
algorithmic proofs (that are "
true for no reason,"
cf.) in which "computers can extract patterns in this ocean of data that no human could ever possibly detect. These patterns are correlations. They may or may not be
causative, but we can learn new things. Therefore they accomplish what science does, although not in the traditional manner... In this part of science, we may get answers that work, but which we don't understand. Is this partial understanding? Or
a different kind of
understanding?" Of course, say some in the scientific community:
hogwash; it's just a fabrication of scientifically/statistically illiterate pundits, like whilst new techniques in
data analysis are being developed to help keep ahead of the deluge...
posted by kliuless
on Jul 21, 2008 -
40 comments
Whether you want to learn to lace shoes, tie shoelaces, stop shoelaces from coming undone, calculate shoelace lengths or even repair aglets,
Ian's Shoelace Site has the answer!
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jun 27, 2008 -
22 comments
Smart Shorties is a new CD being marketed to teachers that takes the beats from popular rap songs and rewrites them to the multiplication tables, with the intent of improving kids' math skills.
Forbes has a nice roundup on it's history, and
NPR has done a featurette on it as well At the very least, it's certainly worth a listen for the chuckle potential, but in addition to that, it's an interesting example of the now-booming
Edutainment industry, something that not only spans
CD's, but also
computer games and even
standalone video game consoles.
also, Smart Shorties is certainly
not the only "Hip-hop in the classroom" product out there,
nor is it the first.
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew
on Jun 8, 2008 -
37 comments
On May 13, security advisories published by
Debian and
Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their
CSPRNG, which is used by
key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable.
[lolcat summary] [more inside]
posted by finite
on May 16, 2008 -
81 comments
A new study in Science claims that
teaching math is better done by teaching the abstract concepts rather than using concrete examples. From an
article by the study authors in Science Mag (requires subscription):
If a goal of teaching mathematics is to produce knowledge that students can apply to multiple situations, then presenting mathematical concepts through generic instantiations, such as traditional symbolic notation, may be more effective than a series of "good examples." This is not to say that educational design should not incorporate contextualized examples. What we are suggesting is that grounding mathematics deeply in concrete contexts can potentially limit its applicability. Students might be better able to generalize mathematical concepts to various situations if the concepts have been introduced with the use of generic instantiations.
posted by peacheater
on Apr 26, 2008 -
27 comments
If you could use a great big free handbook of discrete math and algorithms, Jörg Arndt's
fxtbook wants to be your friend. Plain text
table of contents to whet your appetite.
posted by Wolfdog
on Mar 5, 2008 -
11 comments
