Mathematics

The LHC and its lower-energy counterpart in the US, Tevatron, have reported some important Higgs news this past week - details of six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at CERN and another…

In later posts, I want to critique Joy Christian's claim that his counter-example to Bell'sTheorem is “real” (maybe it is, but I suspect not, and will work that out later), but first we have to…

Is stupidity rising? Are we witnessing an alarming proliferation of irrationality and an exuberance of ignorance?  Stupidity seems a concern to a growing group of scholars. Last month alone two…

A new bill, sponsored by Alabama Congresswoman Martha Roby, is going up before Congress - HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, which declares the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be…

This is a very short note, just to help me get a feel for how this editor works. What's so spooky about action at a distance? Entanglement of separated electrons seems no more odd to me than a…

If you want to win the NCAA College Basketball Tournament office pool and know nothing about basketball, the good news is you have just as much chance as devoted college basketball fans unless you…

Comparing athletes across generations is always difficult - in football, for example, players are bigger and stronger but before the hashmark changes of the early 1970s, when the field truly had a…

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…

Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago.   Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City…

In optimization problems, we often encounter second-order equations in which we need to solve for unknowns in order to determine suitable values that are economical for designs as in engineering, and…