Mathematics

Calculate Optimal Bucket Size For Your Halloween Haul

Want a real Halloween nightmare? Imagine filling your child's  too-small bucket in the first three houses and going home with only a  small slice of your kid's potential rake. But if you allow your little monster (or in my case, blue whale with ...

Article - Garth Sundem - Oct 31 2017 - 1:04pm

Two Wrongs Making A Right?

Here we have two words, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, which scholars of those languages will have no difficulty in recognizing as descending from the same ancient Semitic source. In Arabic the word means “error” in the sense of “error message” from a c ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Oct 30 2010 - 6:15am

Archetype Analysis- How World Of Warcraft Will Be The Greatest Sociology Tool Ever

1,400,000 70-dimension histogram vectors about gamer behavior.  What can you do with that? Me?  Nothing, the math is too much but, if you can make sense of it, a lot of data is there in the ongoing online gaming phenomenon known as World of Warcraft(WoW). ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Nov 3 2010 - 5:01pm

Calculating The Speed Of Mess

Equations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond. But what about relating speed and MESS? Simply, how fast should you expect a clean kids' room to get messy? ...

Article - Garth Sundem - Nov 14 2010 - 11:32am

New York Times: The Lost Puzzles- Answers And A Correction

First, I'm afraid I fell victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get in involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this: probability is not additive (as a couple astute Times readers have now ...

Article - Garth Sundem - Dec 9 2010 - 11:51am

8 year olds published in peer-reviewed journal

Some detractors believe science is an 'old boys network' resistant to outsiders- if that were true, a group of young boys and girls wouldn't have their first journal publication.  At age eight. Biology Letters has a study conducted by an Eng ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Sep 5 2012 - 7:11pm

Cosmic Embryo #1: My Erdös Number Is 2i

Icon for Cosmic Embryo: Erupting star V838 Monocerotis  ”On 2010-09-26, at 5:01 AM, Frithjof A.S. Sterrenburg wrote: Dear Richard! Sorry to hear you have been in the claws of the barber-surgeons.  Hope everything is well now!… As for your itinerant existe ...

Article - Richard (Dick) Go... - May 26 2011 - 8:12pm

Predicting The Collapse Of Society Using Mathematics

Was the fall of the Roman Empire or, as often predicted, the coming fall of the American Empire, numerically predictable? It is, according to research led by Sergey Gavrilets, associate director for scientific activities at the National Institute for Math ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2011 - 12:10pm

Partition Numbers Behave Like Fractals, Says Mathematician

For hundreds of years, mathematicians even as great as Leonhard Euler (1) have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting.  Progress has been made but there has never been a full theory to explain partitions.   Answers have ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2011 - 8:41pm

Statistical Mechanics Of Saturn's Rings

How does something made of loose particles sometimes behave like a solid, liquid or gas? For example, dry sand acts like a solid when you stand on it but like a liquid when you try to scoop some up in your hand. Or how Saturn's rings act like a fluid. ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 13 2011 - 11:28am