Mathematics

Rational Suckers

Why do people skip the queue, obstruct, cause traffic jams, and create delays for everyone? Who are these anonymous creatures lacking cooperation skills? And more importantly: are you sure others don't classify you as such? ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Jan 1 2013 - 11:31am

Structured Expert Elicitation: Can Polling Predict Future Sea Level Rises?

It's statistical polling...for science.  A paper in Nature Climate Change uses structured expert elicitation and mathematically pools experts' opinions to forecast future sea level rises from melting ice sheets. Soliciting and pooling expert jud ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 6 2013 - 5:45pm

What's Wrong With Superrationality?

Regulars to this blog know I am partial to game theory. The very idea that mathematical reasoning can teach us a thing or two about the strategies we deploy in social interactions, is most intriguing. Game theory recognizes that humans do possess rational ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Jan 12 2013 - 2:51pm

Mathematicians Make Teleportation Possible (Again)

If you are going to use 'entanglement' to teleport quantum information on a practical scale, it needs to be worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections. Writing in  Physical Review Le ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 16 2013 - 12:26pm

Why Weather Forecasts Are Wrong So Often

It's easy to blame weather forecasting when the forecast says one thing and ends up being another, but Brigham Young University mechanical engineering professor Julie Crockett says it may not be the fault of the meteorologists.  According to Crockett ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 24 2013 - 5:30pm

Weekend Science: The Mathematics Of Coffee Rings

The “coffee-ring effect” is a commonplace occurrence that happens when drops of liquid with suspended particles dry, leaving a ring-shaped stain at the drop’s edges. How those particles stack up as they reach the drop’s edge, and how different particles ma ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 25 2013 - 8:55pm

Monte Carlo And More: The Achille's Heel Of Simulation

A new paper outlines the many pitfalls associated with simulation methods such as Monte Carlo algorithms and other commonly used molecular dynamics approaches. ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 3 2013 - 2:00pm

Grasping Gap Geometry

Mathematicians have shown how to use an algorithm for analyzing void space in sphere packing where the spheres need not all be the same size.  This method could be applied to analyze the geometry of liquids present between multi-sized spheres that are aki ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 1 2013 - 12:04pm

Predicting Disease Vectors In A Population

How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a disease will spread and a new model seeks to lay the foundation for new zoonotic disease spread thinking By outlining a ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 6 2013 - 10:45am

A Prime Valentine's Day

It is somewhat surreal to see the discovery of the largest prime number paraded on prime time broadcast media. Mathematicians around the world are asked to explain the significance of this discovery in layman’s terms, which is up there with physicists tryi ...

Article - Richard Mankiewicz - Dec 9 2013 - 3:53pm