Math in the Movies: Up
As many of you are no doubt aware, Pixar's latest film opens this weekend. I have yet to see the film, so I'm sure I am spoiling nothing by telling you that part of the film involves an old man flying through the sky by means of balloons that are attached to his house.
Do not try this Given that I have yet to see the film, you may wonder how I could possibly hope to connect it to mathematics. Thankfully, I don't have to - the work has been done for me by Alexis Madrigal over at Wired.com, who wrote an article discussing the feasibility of using balloons to take to the skies in one's own home.
His assumptions are that the house weighs roughly 100,000 pounds, and that the balloons are spherically shaped with a diameter of three feet, which may seem large at first, but seems more reasonable if you look at other shots of the floating house.
How many balloons does that look like to you?
Based on these assumptions, and the weights of air and helium, Mr. Madrigal estimated...
Baby Animals Just Want to Do Math
Over the past few months there have been several studies aimed at understanding the mathematical sophistication of some of our friends in the animal kingdom. This is a topic I have discussed before, but these new findings are interesting and worth mentioning.
The most recent experiment involves the cutest animal discussed so far: baby chicks. Don't let their looks fool you, my friend, for under that puff of yellow down sits a mind capable of mathematical wizardry. Surprisingly, researchers found that chicks were not only able to perform simple mental calculations, but could do so from a very young age.
How do you tell if a baby chick can do math? Well, apparently the little ones try to stay close to familiar objects (for example, their mother). Moreover, given the choice between a small group of familiar objects and a larger group of familiar objects, researchers noted that chicks tended to gravitate towards the larger group.
But what if some calculation is required to determine...
Math Gets Around, and So Does Disease (Both Real and Virtual)
Most of us are familiar with the story of Chicken Little, the young chicken turn Disney sellout who one day has a major panic attack because she (or he, depending on the version you're told) believes that the sky is falling.
No doubt this fable has conditioned many of us to be wary of chickens that try to warn us of impending crises. But given the recent media frenzy surrounding swine flu, perhaps we should turn our attention away from the chicken, concerns over avian flu notwithstanding, and focus a bit more on the humble pig.
There is some debate on this issue: while everyone seems to be in agreement that the swine flu outbreak is, so far, milder than many had anticipated, health officials have cautioned that we may not yet be out of the proverbial woods (or pigpen, as the case may be). At the same time, however, one can just as easily find articles that argue that maybe this whole thing has been overhyped.
Cute family film, or a foreshadowing the apocalypse?
This divergence of...
When will this stop?
Ok, now it's just getting annoying. Odd day? Give me a break.
My thoughts on this irritating trend can be found here, here, and here.
Mathematics Awareness Month 2009
With April on its way out, it behooves me to take a moment and mention the focus of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month. April has been bestowed with this glorious title every year since 1986 - last year the topic was Mathematics and Voting, which I discussed at some length in three earlier posts (see here, here, and here).
This year's focus is on Mathematics and Climate. On the homepage you can find links to a variety of articles, most of which focus on the difficulty in coming up with mathematical models that can accurately reflect the complexity of the interconnected world in which we live. This is perhaps best summarized by Professor Pat Kenschaft, who writes the following in her essay, "Climate Change: A Research Opportunity for Mathematics?":
How do we analyze the dynamics of the atmosphere, the oceans, the solid earth (especially volcanic emissions) and the biosphere (the system of plants, animals, and other living things)? Scientists have studied pieces of these systems...
How Low Can We Go?
I'm not sure, but this seems like a good candidate for a new bar. According to a recent study out of the University of Washington, as many as half of the population may fail to understand simple probability statements, in the context of weather forecasts.
Here's the summary:
If, for example, a forecast calls for a 20 percent chance of rain, many people think it means that it will rain over 20 percent of the area covered by the forecast. Others think it will rain for 20 percent of the time, said Susan Joslyn, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Washington who conducted the study.
Coming out of Washington, one would think that the participants would have a better than average understanding of rain forecasts, but now I certainly hope that's not the case.
That's American math literacy for you. Maybe everyone should just move to LA - at least here, the forecast is the same every day.
Ballpark Mathematics
Like the dawn of a new day, the start of the baseball season carries with it tremendous promise. These first few weeks provide a reprieve from the breakneck pace of March Madness, where every team is burdened with the knowledge that one loss is all it takes to prevent it from total victory. Instead, the major leagues are a product of the season in which they begin, and just as the warming weather invites us to spend weekend afternoons on grassy knolls looking for shapes in the clouds, so too do the opening games of the baseball season encourage us to let our hair down and reacquaint ourselves with this traditional American pastime.
However, eventually Spring must give way to Summer, and Summer must give way to Fall. As the days grow shorter, so does the window of opportunity for a team to make it into the playoffs, making every game in that final stretch increasingly important for teams that may be on the cusp of attaining a trip to the post-season. As with many things in life,...
Numb3rs in Real Life
For those who don't believe we can actually use math to fight crime, the story of Harry Markopolos, the man who blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff, shows that a dream of using math to catch criminals need not be untenable. In a recent interview for 60 Minutes, Mr. Markopolos describes how he harnessed the power of mathematics to discover that whatever Mr. Madoff was doing, it had to be illegal.
Bernie's luck was bound to run out sooner or later, as he must've known. His seeming success was really nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme - in other words, he was able to pay his investors amazing returns by taking money from new investors, rather than by creating new wealth. It doesn't take a mathematician to realize that such a plan is unsustainable, since the more successful your scheme becomes, the more new investors you require in order to keep the scheme successful. Eventually, the pool of new investors will become too small, and the scheme will collapse. Bernie Madoff must have...
Numerology Goes on Holiday (Again)
I made my reservations fairly clear regarding the double dose of math holidays last month. Despite my objections, I remained confident that the headlines they gathered would quickly fade away, and I wouldn't have to worry about these faux math headlines for the next 12 months. In this way, I was able to sleep peacefully at night.
Unfortunately, it seems there are those who wish to disturb my slumber.
Dan Vergano over at USA Today recently wrote a brief article which highlighted the fact that this year there are a whopping 2 "square days," one of which is today, 4/01/2009. The day is called a square day because if you read the date as a number, the number turns out to be square. In this case, 4,012,009 = 2003 * 2003.
The article attempts to be relevant by making a tenuous link between this sort of mathematical wizardry and the latest film excursion into numerology - Nicolas Cage's most recent triumph, Knowing. Mr. Vergano was also kind enough to link to my article on Square Root...
Math in the Movies: Stand and Deliver
During the course of my K-12 math education, I was able to watch Stand and Deliver two times during math class. The first time was in 5th or 6th grade, and during this first viewing I was less inspired by the mathematics than by the stellar performance of Lou Diamond Phillips, whose winning catch phrase "I strangled him, his body's decomposing in my locker" has stuck with me well into my adult life.
The second time I saw the film was in high school, during the month between the AP exams and summer vacation when teachers are generally a little less rigorous with their lesson plans. Wiser now, I was able to more fully appreciate the mathematics on display in the film. I understood what it was like to sit down for an AP Test, and while I've never had Andy Garcia accuse me of cheating, I think I can imagine what it would feel like. Because of this, I was able to relate to the film on a deeper level.
Recently, I decided to watch this film for a third time, to see how this film compares...
Page 16 of 20