Can't Get No Satisfaction - This unassuming essay (it's in a state of half-decay with missing figures) is a fascinating (and accessible) overview of phase transitions in NP systems (it explains those terms). In other words: complex physical systems and difficult problems in computing are related. The seminal paper is here, and this is a list of other essays by the same author (links at foot of page).
posted on Feb 5, 2004 - View this thread

Fun with Fibonacci numbers. So you say you scored 130 on yesterday's IQ test, did ya?
posted on Oct 28, 2003 - View this thread

Do you have problems finding the cheapest flight? Well so do computers.
Carl de Marcken, the man who created the engine behind Orbitz and other travel search engines posits that finding the cheapest fare from one point to another is a NP-Hard problem. Even if you fix the specific route between destinations there can be as many as 10³⁶ combinations.
posted on Dec 9, 2002 - View this thread

Paul Bourke of Auckland has an excellent set of elegant and informative webpages for the kind of math you look at. Even if math perplexes you, his pages are still quite pretty and often make for interesting reading regardless. Every place I've worked between college and now, Paul has given me pages that nicely explained how to do somthing I needed to do and even personal help on occasion. Here's to you, Paul!
posted on Oct 28, 2002 - View this thread

Wow your friends [google] and learn a little history behind the best card trick. [pdf]
posted on Aug 16, 2002 - View this thread

NDb -(60% x Nc/Nt +40% x Dc/Dt) x 17,585
"Mathematicians called in by the Metropolitan Police think they have worked out the best way to beat crime in the capital."
Are there any UK mathematician/cops out there that know what the variables actually are?
posted on Jan 17, 2002 - View this thread

LavaRand ...harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers....

That's a bold statement, but who am I to doubt the power of the lava lamp. The mathematical purist may disagree with the "truely random" part, but this geek speak convinced me that LavaRand can handle all my random number needs.
posted on Apr 30, 2001 - View this thread

Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!
posted on Mar 15, 2001 - View this thread

The passing of a giant. Claude Shannon has died. He was a man of towering intellect, whose achievements are dwarfed only by the ignorance of the public to the value of those achievements. All our lives have been radically changed by him, but I bet not one person in a hundred has even heard of him.
posted on Mar 2, 2001 - View this thread

The Key Vanishes: Scientist Outlines Unbreakable Code [NEW YORK TIMES - free reg required]
In essence, the researcher, Dr. Michael Rabin and his Ph.D. student Yan Zong Bing, have discovered a way to make a code based on a key that vanishes even as it is used. While they are not the first to have thought of such an idea, Dr. Rabin says that never before has anyone been able to make it both workable and to prove mathematically that the code cannot be broken.
 
Once this gets out, the debate on exporting strong crypto would seem to be essentially over.
posted on Feb 20, 2001 - View this thread

Americans suck at math. Mathematician trade deficit ensues... I only find this article interesting because of a talk with my math teacher recently about how most math teachers these days are foriegners, although she isn't, and not that foriegners are bad. But I'm curious if this a bad problem in today's economy or not? Or if this is a problem? What country is good at math? India and China? That's where most of the Silicon Valley CEO's workers are from these days. Or is that political, financial? I don't know. Do you know?
posted on Feb 7, 2001 - View this thread

Hey, kids! Statistics is cool! (Amazing introduction to the concept of estimation, and error computing.)
posted on Oct 24, 2000 - View this thread

The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other 'millenium prize problems'] the clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M
posted on May 24, 2000 - View this thread