Math
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Math
Pinpointing Killer Asteroids
Two award-winning high school students' projects focused on new methods for pinpointing asteroids locations.
- Math
Deriving the Structure of Numbers
A novel mathematical function called the number derivative offers new insights into the structure of integers.
- Math
Mapping Scientific Frontiers
Can computer visualization help identify turning points and milestones in scientific discovery?
- Math
Mining the Tagged Web
IBM's WebFountain project gathers and annotates Web content on a vast scale to serve as a platform for data miners.
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- Math
Toss Out the Toss-Up: Bias in heads-or-tails
Coin tossing is inherently biased, with the coin more likely to land on the same face it started on.
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- Math
Sculpting with a Twist
There’s more than one way to slice a bagel. A bagel (or a doughnut) can serve as a physical model for a mathematical surface called a torus. You can slice it horizontally (or longitudinally) so that you end up with two halves, each containing a hole. That’s great for making sandwiches because the cut exposes […]
- Math
Computing on a Cellular Scale
The behavior of leaf pores resembles that of mathematical systems known as cellular automata.
- Math
Computation’s New Leaf
Plants in which large numbers of simple units interact with one another appear to compute how to coordinate the actions of their cells effectively.
- Math
Hunting e
Of the irrational, transcendental numbers, pi seems to get all the attention. Web sites and books celebrate its quirks and quandaries. Its digits have been computed to 1,241,100,000,000 decimal places. Lagging far behind in the celebrity sweepstakes is the number known as e. Carried to 20 decimal places, e is 2.71828 18284 59045 23536. Only […]
- Math
Turning a Snowball Inside Out
Turning a sphere inside out without allowing any sharp creases along the way is a tricky mathematical maneuver. Carving an intricate snow sculpture depicting a crucial step in this twisty transformation presents its own difficulties. This was the challenge facing a team led by mathematician Stan Wagon of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., last […]
