MetaFilter posts tagged with math

Math education

russilwvong — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:28:06 -0800

How should math be taught? The Kumon Math curriculum provides a simple and clear description of one possible sequence of skills. Hung-Hsi Wu decries the bogus dichotomy of basic skills versus conceptual understanding (PDF, Google Docs). David Klein provides a detailed history of US K-12 math education in the 20th century. The NYT describes the 2008 report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (full text as PDF). NYC HOLD, a conservative-leaning math education reform group, has a large collection of links to articles on math education. For the progressive side, see Hyman Bass and Deborah Ball.

In Soviet Russia, equations solve you

twoleftfeet — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:36:57 -0800

The strength of post-Soviet math stems from decades of lonely productivity. Russian math.

It Was a Monster Math!

Christ, what an asshole — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:07:03 -0800

We all wish we had a teacher like this

unbump.

kaibutsu — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:11:50 -0800

SAGE is a free, open-source computer algebra system. SAGE is notable for bringing together a number of existing (and extremely fast) open source projects under a single umbrella, and religiously avoiding redundant code. The idea is to create a free alternative to closed-source systems like Mathematica, Maple, and MATLab. In spite of its buffet-style approach to computation, it already runs considerably faster than Mathematica in many situations. Importantly, open-source software is easier to ethically cite in academic papers, since the code is available for review. As a result, a number of researchers (including me) regularly use SAGE in their work, using its massive computational power to find new results to prove.

The crying of x^2 + xy + y^2 = 49

escabeche — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:00:24 -0800

"Pynchon, postmodern author, is commonly said to have a non-linear narrative style. No one seems to have taken seriously the possibility, to be explored in this essay, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic." Number theorist Michael Harris on Pynchon and conic sections.

Math Overflow

escabeche — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:28:26 -0800

Math Overflow is the first attempt to use the Stack Exchange platform, already popular with programmers, as a scientific research tool. Founded this month by a group of young mathematicians, including Scott Morrison and Ben Webster of the Secret Blogging Seminar, the site is already wrestling with hundreds of questions, ranging from the technical ("When is a map given by a word surjective?") to the historical ("Most interesting mathematics mistake?")

Raise Thumb. Close One Eye. Squint.

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:01:27 -0800

The eyeballing game: compare your best attempts at several instinctive everyday tasks - determining a point of convergence, bisecting an angle, finding the midpoint of a line - against mathematical certainty. In a more financial mood? Play Chartgame: given a random historical stock chart of an unnamed S&P 500 company, choose to buy and sell as time advances to see if you can beat the market.

Nate Silver accusess polling firm of fraud

The Devil Tesla — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:51:20 -0800

42.7 percent of all statistics are made up: After Strategic Visions refused to share the methodology behind some of their polling, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight analyzed the firm's poling results and found evidence of fraud. Strategic Visions responds to The Hill. More amusingly, Nate went on a look at an even more questionable study by the same company claiming that only 23 percent of Oklahoma students know that George Washington is the first president. For good measure, Silver compared the Strategic Visions data with a control set. Continuing ~~research~~ obsessive inquisition revealed that the Atlanta address on Strategic Visions's website is not the company's actual address.

Math Geekery

netbros — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:37:10 -0800

For math geeks. How to Draw the Voronoi Diagram. Voronoi diagrams, as a geometric model are fascinating because they can be used to describe almost literally everything: from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale: from quantum foam to cosmic foam. See also the Wallpaper Group: there are only 17 ways to fill a plane with a regular 2 dimensional pattern. Fred Scharmen [weblog home] is known as 765 and also produces a number of shapes, textures and patterns.

More than just beautiful minds

Frobenius Twist — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:51:03 -0800

Photographer Mariana Cook has a new book of portraits of well-known mathematicians. Here's a slideshow with some interesting audio, and more of the photographs.

The P vs. NP problem and its importance

kliuless — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:46:03 -0800

The Status of the P Versus NP Problem It's one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers. (via mr)

Figure 3. Basic model outbreak scenario. Susceptibles are quickly eradicated and zombies take over, infecting everyone.

brundlefly — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:03:37 -0800

When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection [pdf] (via)

Parkinson's Law

digaman — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:56:20 -0800

Why bureaucracy, like gas, fills up all available space. From the archive of The Economist, 1955 [via ArchiveDigger.]

A constant reminder

swift — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:08:04 -0800

"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. Previously, approximately.

I will choose free will

kliuless — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:11:27 -0800

The Free Will Theorem - "If there exist experimenters with (some) free will, then elementary particles also have (some) free will." (previously)

Gimme That Old Time Derivation

DU — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:37:41 -0800

The Cornell Historical Math Monographs archive has a great many famous papers, including works by De Morgan, Hamilton, Descartes (warning: French) and of course Lewis Carroll. Found while searching for this interesting paper.

I am a strange loop.

loquacious — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:30:41 -0800

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

Beware of Oddity

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:00:50 -0800

Happy Odd Day! Join the facebook group, win 575 dollars! Previously

Theory versus Statistics, Financial Economics Edition.

chunking express — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:14:14 -0800

Theory versus Statistics, Financial Economics Edition. "You can almost here the lament of this quant that the real math theory has been dead since 1980, and that it has all been applied and statistics ever since. It’s like Fischer Black was Kool Herc and Myron Scholes was Afrika Bambaataa, and they’d all go plug in their computers into lamp posts and do martingale representations in the streets and at house parties. And, of course, it was all ruined in 1979 when it went commercial." A response to The Last Temptation of Risk by Barry Eichengreen.

Computable data* (conceivably knowable) about people

kliuless — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:42:19 -0800

Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine - at the same time Google Adds Search to Public Data, viz: "Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast" -- like a cross between designing for big data and a glossary of game theory terms -- on Wolfram|Alpha (previously), yet the veil is being lifted nonetheless: "[on] a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before," cf. hunch & cyc (and in other startup news...) [via] *boiling it down to that which can be computed (about the world)

The five states of Texas

aerotive — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:00:17 -0800

Following the recent uproar over Texas and the possibility of its secession (previously), Fivethirtyeight.com puts forward a theoretical division of Texas into five states: Plainland, Trinity, Gulfland, New Texas, and El Norte.

Information doesn't want to be scale free

escabeche — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:48:33 -0800

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."

I want my MathTV

Brian B. — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:44:08 -0800

MathTV is a real problem solver for many. It is also found on YouTube, and is free. Here is some background.

Dolphins caught on film making art and doing science.

Toekneesan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:51:07 -0800

Dolphins at SeaWorld Orlando make and play with bubble rings. Others learn by watching. (SLYP) via Checkout the related videos on the right to see other examples of this behavior.

The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

parudox — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:37:33 -0800

Ever wondered what comes next, and why? The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has the answers. (Previously.)