Column
- Math
Setting Records Randomly
A wide variety of factors can influence the winning time of a race. For a given event over the course of a year, for example, the results may depend on the quality of the runners, the race location, weather conditions, and so on. In a 1985 article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, […]
- Math
Crystal Möbius
Take a ribbon of paper, twist one end 180 degrees, and attach it to the other end. The resulting surface, called a Möbius strip, has only one side and one edge. Scanning electron microscope image shows niobium selenide crystals in a Möbius-strip conformation (top). In the schematic diagram (bottom), a white ribbon represents a niobium […]
- Math
A Lawyer’s Math Library
“Strangely enough, anyone wishing to write about Galois in Paris would do well to journey to Louisville, Kentucky.”–Leopold Infeld, Whom the Gods Love LOUISVILLE, KY. French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832), whose death in a duel at the age of 20 cut short a remarkably productive career, is only one of many mathematicians represented in a […]
- Math
Song-and-Dance Fermat
The proof of a mathematical conjecture–even one as famous as Fermat’s last theorem–may sound like an improbable subject for an off-Broadway-style musical. Yet there’s plenty of drama and passion in the story of Fermat’s last theorem. These elements take center stage in Fermat’s Last Tango, a musical written by the husband-and-wife team Joshua Rosenblum and […]
- Math
Prime Spirals
Precisely defined yet enticingly elusive, prime numbers occupy a central place in number theory. Evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, these special integers–2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, and so on–pose all sorts of conundrums. In a square grid, numbering squares instead of line intersections serves as […]
- Math
Getting Clobbered
Clobber is a new two-person game that’s easy to learn and fun to play and, for the mathematically inclined, rife with analytical possibility. Initial placement of white and black stones on a 5 x 6 rectangular board. The “standard” game is played on a rectangular grid of squares–say, a portion of a checkerboard. One player […]
- Math
Tricky Dice Revisited
The game involves a set of four cubic dice, each one numbered differently. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more turns, you will nearly […]
- Math
Tricky Dice Revisited
The game involves a set of four cubic dice, each one numbered differently. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more turns, you will nearly […]
- Math
The EKG Sequence
Sequences of numbers have long fascinated both amateur and professional mathematicians. Many people are familiar with the Fibonacci sequence, in which each new term is the sum of the previous two terms: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and so on. More than 69,000 other sequences of interest to mathematicians […]
- Math
Rainbow Randomness
The branch of pure mathematics known as Ramsey theory concerns the existence of highly regular patterns in sufficiently large sets of randomly selected objects, whether they are gatherings of people, piles of pebbles, stars in the night sky, or sequences of numbers generated by the throw of a die. Jacob Licht Patterns can arise out […]
- Math
Highway Relativity
There may be more to zipping along in the fast lane than meets the casual eye. Freeway drivers often sense that cars in an adjacent lane are moving faster than those in their own lane. That’s certainly true when the average speed of the cars in the next lane is significantly higher than that of […]
- Math
Highway Relativity
There may be more to zipping along in the fast lane than meets the casual eye. Freeway drivers often sense that cars in an adjacent lane are moving faster than those in their own lane. That’s certainly true when the average speed of the cars in the next lane is significantly higher than that of […]
