Mathematics

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

2013 will be the year of Mathematics of Planet Earth. This global initiative was spearheaded by Professor Christiane Rousseau of the University of Montreal, and it was fitting that the first national…

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician known for intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without using proofs or modern mathematical tools. Instead, the devout…

In the history of statistics, economy and decision theory, the St. Petersburg paradox plays a key role. This lottery problem goes back a full three centuries to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli…

We all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments. If…