Mathematics

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…

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…

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…

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…

It's worth dusting this off: a simple, accurate equation that decides to the penny how much you should spend on anyone's gift this holiday season. Get cracking you slacker. I wrote this for the…

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…

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? Friends Jonathan Liu and…

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…

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…

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…