You're reading: Posts Tagged: press release

Insect numeracy standards overtake KS2

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In what must surely now be described as a classic maths news item, yet another species of animal has joined the ranks of things which can determine rank. This time it’s the humble fruit fly’s turn to tap its hoof the correct number of times, as these articles in The Metro and Nature (the two standard science references for their respective ends of the credibility spectrum) describe. Props to The Metro for an excellent headline pun.

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‘RightingBot’ simulates the way lizards right themselves when falling

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RightingBot

RightingBot. Credit: Tom Libby

Lizards, just like cats, have a knack for landing on their feet when they fall. But unlike cats, which twist and bend their torsos to turn in the air, lizards swing their large tails one way to rotate their body the other, according to a recent study. And the longer the tail, the smaller the movement needed. The study used high-speed video, developed a mathematical model and finally used this to develop a lizard-inspired robot, called ‘RightingBot’, which replicates the feat.

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Lotka–Volterra competition models applied to LA street gang territories

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A mathematical model previously used to determine the hunting range of animals in the wild, namely the ‘formal spatial Lotka–Volterra competition model’, apparently holds promise for mapping the territories of street gangs.

Lead author P. Jeffrey Brantingham is quoted in a press release saying: “The way gangs break up their neighborhoods into unique territories is a lot like the way lions or honey bees break up space”.

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Tony Mann to lecture on ‘Computing Mathematics’ at Gresham College

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Tony Mann from the University of Greenwich has been appointed Visiting Professor of Computing Mathematics at Gresham College, London. This means he will deliver a

series of free public lectures will look at the mathematics of computing, and the computing of mathematics. The lectures will consider what can go wrong, how computers sometimes get the wrong answer, and the ingenuity mathematicians have used in overcoming these inherent problems.  Since Gresham Professors such as Henry Briggs, Edmund Gunter and, more recently, Louis Milne-Thomson were pioneers in the mechanisation of computation, he is especially pleased to address these subjects at Gresham College.

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Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions

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This is just about the most right-on, 21st-century paper and associated PR I’ve seen this year. MIT’s SENSEable City Lab has produced this little video to go with a paper by some of their researchers, led by Carlo Ratti:

So we have a slickly produced YouTube video announcing an open-access paper about big data with a trendy creative commons 8-bit music track behind it. I don’t know whether to applaud them on a job well done or to have an adverse reaction against that much political correctness and PR budget in one place.

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