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Roger Penrose
As he publishes his collected works — six volumes comprising more than 5,000 pages — mathematical physicist Roger Penrose muses on 50 years of groundbreaking research in general relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, geometry and consciousness... [pdf] [paid text]
Perfect Parallel Parking
Late last year, the mathematician Simon Blackburn devised a simple formula for “perfect parking.” When a Louisiana math teacher found the formula unrealistic, he set out to improve the model... [text]
Deception by the Numbers
Bad statistics are “toxic to democracy”, argues science journalist Charles Seife in his latest book Proofiness. Seife's polemic against the reporters, politicians, scientists, lawyers and bankers who spread tenacious and specious statistical claims is strident but sobering... [partial text] [pdf]
Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Fractal Geometry
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. “If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end..." [text]
Beyond the Tragic Genius
A lonely man flirts with madness to recover truth—or so it goes in films from Pi to Proof. But where did the figure of the tragic mathematician originate? In Duel at Dawn, historian Amir Alexander pierces the haze that has gathered around great mathematical lives to reveal gloriously complicated men... [pdf] [text]
Math-Art on the Bowery
While pursuing his doctorate in dynamical systems, John Sims was drawn to explore the connections between mathematics and art. Now curating a year-long series of math–art shows at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, the conceptual artist explains his work...[pdf] [text]
Perfect Rigor
In 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, a problem that had resisted proof for a century. But soon after he gave up mathematics and retreated to his mother's apartment in St. Petersburg. Why did Perelman turn his back on the world? This question haunts Masha Gessen’s “Perfect Rigor,” a dogged portrait of an elusive man... [text]
Pursuing the Infinite
The authors of Naming Infinity argue that an esoteric Christian sect contributed to advances in set theory in Russia at the dawn of the 20th century. But they reveal a much larger drama: the flourishing of mathematics under the repression of the early Soviet regime... [pdf] [text]
Science on Stage
Last year, after a play about the life of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, a stranger walked to the stage and said, "You got it exactly right." It was Trivers himself...
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Adrian Kantrowitz,
Cardiac Pioneer
Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, who performed the first human heart transplant in the United States in 1967, died Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich... [full text]
Science at the Movies
When scientists appear on the big screen, if at all, they tend to be going mad or else paying for their hubris — think Dr. Strangelove, Jurassic Park and A Beautiful Mind. This month, two new film festivals aim to correct this impression... [full text]
Maths and Mad Hatters
Legend has it that Queen Victoria was so enchanted by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that she insisted on Lewis Carroll's next work being sent to her. One can imagine her expression as she opened the book that arrived, entitled An Elementary Treatise on Determinants...[full text] [pdf]
A Universal Library of Math?
All the mathematical literature ever published runs to more than 50 million pages, with around 75,000 articles added each year. Over the past decade there have been several attempts to make this prodigious body of work accessible in a single digital archive, but so far none has succeeded... [full text]
The Riemann Hypothesis
The Riemann Hypothesis is, roughly speaking, a 150-year-old guess about how the prime numbers are spaced along the number line. Computers have been able to give very strong evidence for this guess, and hundreds of papers have been written assuming its validity. It is one of those rare problems that is both intelligible to the uninitiated and of deep mathematical interest. But despite the efforts of generations of the world’s best mathematicians, it has yet to be proved or disproved ...
Pigskin Pythagoras
IN FOOTBALL, not all 15-yard passes are created equal. Say it's the end of the 4th quarter of Super Bowl XXXVIII and the Panthers are trailing by three on their own 35-yard line. It's 4th-and-16 with a minute left. Delhomme...
Erik Friedlander: Maldoror
[Brassland; 2003] Rating: 8.3 In 1846, Isidor Ducasse was born to a French consular official in Uruguay. By 1862, he had graduated from a French boarding school, where he's said to have excelled at arithmetic, drawing, and Latin verse...
Solving the Poincaré Conjecture
BERKELEY, Calif. - A reclusive Russian mathematician appears to have answered a question that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century. After a decade of isolation in St. Petersburg, over the last year Grigory Perelman posted a few papers...
Stars and Signs Forever
Every day, tens of millions of Americans read their horoscopes. The predictions of love and wealth are, if not reassuring, at least diverting. The personality profiles -- based on the division of the night sky into 12 houses, each...
Are All Elections Chaotic?
WITH 135 NAMES on the ballot, the confusions of the California recall election may make Florida's stray butterfly ballots look like kindergarten chaos theory. Or so says Donald Saari, a mathematician at the University of California, Irvine, who claims to list all possible "election paradoxes'' in a slim, accessible volume called "Chaotic Elections!'' (AMS, 2001). Saari sees the potential for "chaos'' in even the simplest election procedures...
It Takes Four
Here's a problem Lewis Carroll enjoyed posing to kids like Alice: how many colors do you need to fill in any map so that neighboring countries are always colored differently? It sounds simple enough. But when a Victorian law...
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