Besides a reason to enjoy baked goods while feeling mathematically in-the-know, just what is π anyway?
The art of origami has been going through a renaissance over the past 30 years, with new designs being created at ever-increasing levels of complexity. It’s no coincidence that this rise in origami complexity has emerged at the same time scientists, mathematicians and origami artists themselves have been discovering more and more of the mathematical rules that govern how paper folding works.
Back in 2012, more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina’s Congressional elections. But Republicans ended up winning nine out of the state’s 13 seats that year. Those numbers piqued the interest of researchers at Duke, who decided to seek a mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. They recently published a study with their results.
Henry Segerman and Saul Schleimer paint beautiful shadows based on the maths of stereographic projection, a method originally used by cartographers to map the Earth
The logarithm is 400 this year. Glen Van Brummelen, a fellow in the Dibner Library of History of Science and Technology, explains how logarithms came to be and why they're considered miraculous.
Examining actual weapons would be a breach of confidentiality: how they’re made and put together is secret, and the fewer people that know what’s inside a nuclear bomb, the better. Luckily, a group of scientists have devised a way to use math, and neutrons, to figure out if something’s actually a nuclear weapon, without learning anything about what’s inside it.
Do people (and animals) make better decisions in groups than on their own? How many people (and what conditions) does it take to make an best decision?
We have failed to make the honest case for quantum computing—the case based on basic science—because we’ve underestimated the public. We’ve falsely believed that people would never support us if we told them the truth: that while the potential applications are wonderful cherries on the sundae, they’re not and have never been the main reason to build a quantum computer. The main reason is that we want to make absolutely manifest what quantum mechanics says about reality
This statistics stuff is important. The correct analysis and interpretation of statistics are sometimes a matter of life and death.
When one of Britain's best-known science writers went to Los Angeles to meet the show's writers for a new book, he found a team dedicated to inserting gags about complex math problems. And you thought it was just a cartoon…
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