Mathematics

The King of Recreational Math Is No More

Martin Gardner died yesterday. His memory will live on through some 70+ books and, above all, through his column " MATHEMATICAL GAMES " in Scientific American. During the 25 years that Gardner's column appeared, it was probably for many amo ...

Blog Post - Johannes Koelman - May 23 2010 - 10:38pm

No Dice- The Probability Of Yahtzee*

While going through old boxes of miscellaneous detritus, I came upon several sheets of paper from my health journalism grad school days. The scribes packed a lot of wisdom into those articles and bullet points, and I'll share various nuggets of knowle ...

Article - Becky Jungbauer - May 29 2010 - 10:34am

Bad Logic- Bertrand Russell Mischief

I'm not a Russell fan so his followers will have different opinions. One particular quirk of symbolic logic is the reason for this column. First it should be said that symbolic logic owes a great debt to Bertrand Russell for early work on that branch ...

Article - Jerry Decker - May 30 2010 - 5:31pm

You're So Predictable!

Rock-paper-scissors, RPS. Who hasn't played it as a child? The game, known by a variety of names such as Rochambeau, Jan-ken and Kauw-bauwi-bo, is played all over the world. The rules are straightforward, and can be explained to a five-year old: Both ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Jun 4 2010 - 8:02pm

International Congress Of Mathematicians- Biggest Geek Festival Ever? It Is When You Add Chess

How geeky do you have to be to attend a mathematical meeting every 4 years- and think India in August is a cool place to do it?   Pretty geeky.   The ultimate geeks. If that is you, we know where you will be August 2010, when the largest gathering of geeks ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 9 2010 - 5:48pm

World Cup- A Flow Network For Soccer Performance Could Change How We Think About Science 2.0

In team sports it is often difficult to determine the value of an individual.   Some sports can do it easily enough, like baseball (1) or basketball, but during the World Cup, casual fans who hear commentators talk about the quality 'form' of a p ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jun 17 2010 - 5:19pm

There shouldn't be a massive Higgs Boson

Consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, there is postulated a Higgs field which determines those particles which are massive and those which are not. Photons are massless. Gluons also are thought to be massless, but they are not free partic ...

Blog Post - John Michael Will... - Jun 27 2010 - 6:10pm

Cellular Automata based halting checker

The following is based on my idea that there are two main problems related to halting problem: That you can not check if program does not halt. You can always check if it does. That the finite state machine solution does not cope with infinities- it has no ...

Blog Post - Helium Väli - Jun 25 2010 - 12:38am

Halting problem solver on 1D cellular automata

Let's say we have 1D cellular automata, bounded at beginning. The following is solution for halting problem- mathematically unproven, somewhat open here and there, but basically very near to what I have seeked. As I have lately rephrased the problem i ...

Blog Post - Helium Väli - Jun 26 2010 - 2:37am

Topological identicalness of computer programs

(updated- more formal, removed some parts and improved general clarity) Over years, I come again and again back to Halting Problem and it's unsolvability..now I have created a system, which is theoretically able to find halting problems in far larger ...

Blog Post - Helium Väli - Jun 29 2010 - 2:24am