Mathematics Awareness Month 2010
As April comes and goes, so too does Mathematics Awareness Month. Every year, the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics swirls mathematics with a different delightful discipline: last year it was climate, and the year before was voting.
This year's theme is mathematics and sports, a topic which has inspired a number of articles here on this site. As usual, there are a number of essays that discuss this theme from various perspectives; while usual suspects such as football and baseball play a central role in many of the essays, other sports get to mingle with mathematics as well, including track, golf, and tennis (also NASCAR, if you consider that a sport).
This dude always thinks about math when he is golfing.
There are too many articles to discuss, so I'd encourage you to go take a look and see if anything strikes your fancy. However, here are a few highlights:
If football is your game, Chris Jones of St. Mary's College of California has written an article about NFL overtime rules...
Knowing
Nicolas Cage commands a powerful fan base. On the one hand, this should be expected of any man with the foresight to see how awesome a film The Rock would turn out to be, but on the other hand, some of his more recent outings (I'm thinking of Bangkok Dangerous, Next, Ghost Rider, and Knowing) have met with less than critical praise. Nevertheless, support for Nicolas Cage has, from my perspective, only seemed to grow over the past few years. Perhaps it's because of the National Treasure series, or because, according to Wikipedia, he named his youngest son Kal-El after Superman. Or perhaps people feel sorry for him because of his tax problems after spending too much money buying castles and islands. Whatever the case, this love for Nicolas Cage manifests itself in a variety of ways, from the usual fan sites such as cagefactor.com, to the less standard celebrity homage known as Nic Cage as Everyone, in which the faces of celebrities are replaced by Cage's charming mug.
Big Poppa,...
How Hard Are Computer Games?
Every week, on days just like today, millions of Americans are afflicted by the debilitating condition known as The Mondays. Urban Dictionary defines The Mondays as follows:
A day generally created for the purpose of making people wish they were someone else. The day you realize you have 4 days of work ahead of you and that they won't be going by fast at all. Symptoms generally include feeling like crap, wishing you were dead, or not showing up for work in general.
For sufferers, The Mondays can be quite painful. However, there are remedies that can alleviate some of these symptoms. For one, individuals can spend their day playing games on the internet, in an attempt to push their troubles into the darkest recesses of their minds. Minesweeper is a popular choice, as is Tetris, as any fan of Office Space knows (in fact, I credit this film with teaching me about the terrible condition known as The Mondays).
Or, if your case of The Mondays is so strong that you've already exhausted...
RIP Mr. Escalante
I'd just like to take a moment to remember Jaime Escalante, who died today at the age of 79. I've talked about this East LA math teacher whose antics were given a national stage in the film Stand and Deliver before, and out of all the films I've seen that try to do justice to mathematics, this one does the best job. So thanks again, Kimo, for reminding us that skill in mathematics, just as with anthing else worth doing, comes from hard work and dedication. Although, I'm sure that a cool hat certainly helps.
Math Really Goes Pop
This morning my good friend Gabe of Motivated Grammar, who is secretly addicted to celebrity gossip, sent me this link to an article from Perez Hilton which is all about mathematics. No, I am not joking - Mr. Hilton apparently loves Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who solved the famous Poincaré conjecture and recently refused a $1 million dollar prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute for his solution.
The Poincaré conjecture, first posed by Poincaré over 100 years ago, is a question about conditions under which an object is essentially a hypersphere, that is, a sphere sitting inside 4 dimensional space. More specifically, it asks whether or not every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere (the answer is affirmative). Believe it or not, there is a fairly accessible article on Wikipedia which describes these terms and briefly discusses Perelman's methods. The $1 million prize stems from the fact that the Clay Institute dubbed this one of the 7 Millennium...
Math Gets Around: Finding a Job and Keeping Your Soul
Hello friends. My apologies for not writing over the past couple of weeks, but I was away at a conference. Being at math conference has its pluses and minuses (pun intended), but one nice thing about being surrounded by other mathematically inclined individuals is that you never have to explain what it is mathematicians do. You may talk a great deal about your research specifically, but everyone understands what it is to do mathematics.
In general, however, math jobs don't get much buzz, aside from academic jobs and the oft-mired quants who have received varying degrees of blame for the recent recession. That's why I'd like to highlight this recent post from the Scientific American blog, which discusses quantitative non-academic job opportunities at start-ups that have nothing to do with finance.
At first glance, it might seem like these companies have nothing to do with one another. Kickstarter aims to connect people with fundraising opportunities for projects they may be interested...
Math in the News(paper)
Last year, Professor Steven Strogatz of Cornell University wrote a series of op-eds for the New York Times that discussed the presence of mathematics in unlikely places. I discussed one of these columns here. Now, either those articles were well-received, or Professor Strogatz is well-connected, because this year he's back in the Times with a much more ambitious series of articles. This time around, Strogatz is attempting to "[write] about the elements of mathematics, from preschool to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject."
Preschool to grad school is a significant amount of ground to cover, but thus far Strogatz has used his articles to assault this goal with gusto. To date, he has tackled counting, patterns in addition, negative numbers, division, and basic high school algebra. This doesn't really do justice to his content, though. Along the way he gives the reader some Sesame Street, and discusses a number of tangential topics...
Finding Love with a Modified Drake's Equation
Some time ago, I wrote an article on the optimal way to select a mate, assuming you know how many eligible partners exist, and that once you've dated someone, you can't go back and date them again (sorry, Drew Barrymore and that dude from the Apple commercials). This is less romantically known as the secretary problem. Let me briefly recall the problem and its solution: suppose you have n candidates, from which you want to pick the best one. This applies to a variety of situations, from hiring a secretary to finding a girlfriend to apartment hunting. In either case, the outcome is the same: you should look at roughly the first n/e of them (yes, that e), and then select the first one after those n/e which is better than all that you have seen so far. While this strategy won't guarantee you get the best choice, it will give you the best choice around 37% of the time.
The major problem with this model is that in many situations, the value of n is unknown. There are ways to circumvent...
Gender Gap Genesis
Late last year, a study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which tried to pin down origins for the gender gap in mathematics education. As I've discussed before, the gender gap in math education is shrinking, and has been shown to be less about biology and more about culture - in cultures where gender equality is weaker, the gender gap is stronger. Nevertheless, even in American culture, the gender gap still persists, and this study by Sian Beilock and others has tried to figure out how, if the gender gap is culturally based, it comes about in young students. The original study can be found here, while a discussion of the study that was featured in the news can be found here.
Professor Beilock and her colleagues tried to correlate young students' math anxiety with the math anxiety of their teachers. In particular, they looked at 1st and 2nd grade students, of whom a vast majority (over 90%) have teachers who are female. The study assessed the math...
Lying with Statistics in Football
In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, some of you fans may be dreading the next six months. To kick off this football drought, I'd like to highlight this article, which was featured on Yahoo yesterday. The article says that Saints quarterback Drew Brees should hope to lose the coin toss at the start of the game, because in the past 43 Super Bowls, the team that won the coin toss had only won 20 times.
An unlucky coin? Unlikely.
Um...what? Who cares? While 20/43 is slightly less than the expected 50%, this difference is not even close to being statistically significant. Actually, the fact that this ratio is only 1 1/2 games shy of the mean is pretty good. Matt Springer has posted an article that discusses why we shouldn't really care about this difference.
Of course, the sample size is naturally restricted by the small number of Super Bowls, but if the author (Mark Pesavento) had really been interested in the question of whether or not the coin toss is correlated with the winner...
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