The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announce that the theme for Math Awareness Month, April 2012, is Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge.
You're reading: Monthly Archives: April 2012
Bacteria may “play” Prisoner’s Dilemma
The American Chemical Society (ACS) are reporting research presented at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the ACS about game theory in bacteria. The research investigated chemical signals exchanged between cells, which the press release calls “chat”. The press release reports that:
Faced with drought, radiation, over-crowding or other harsh environmental conditions, B. subtilis engages in quorum sensing, with individual microbes releasing chemical compounds that enable it to check out how their neighbors are responding to the unfavorable environment. Members of a colony of B. subtilis may decide to respond to the stressful environment in one of two ways.
Infographic – Women in STEM
Feminist website Hello Ladies has posted an infographic, from EngineeringDegree.net, discussing the discrepancy in achievement between men and women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. It’s beautifully presented, and compares the early attainment of boys and girls (higher for girls) and then the subsequent decline in both confidence and choosing STEM subjects. Draw your own conclusions about causality. The list of percentages of people of each gender in various STEM subjects doesn’t include maths, but does show which subjects feel the lack of women more extremely (in particular, engineering subjects fare worse than sciences).
What sank the Titanic?
RMS Titanic, which sank on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, is the subject of seemingly a million TV programmes this month and a new article in Physics World. The article attempts to answer the obvious question:
When people ask the question “What sank the Titanic?”, at first glance the answer is obvious: she hit an iceberg. But that simplistic answer masks deeper and more substantive questions: why did the Titanic hit the berg in the first place and why did she sink so quickly?
IMA W. Mids 17 April: ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison
On 17th April 2012 the West Midlands Branch of the IMA will hear ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison. in Birmingham near New Street railway station. Non-members welcome, no charge is made. Abstract:
Current military operations emphasise the need for mobility more than ever. Thus, routing convoys so that they reach their correct destinations in the shortest time is important. However, the planning itself can be considerable and must be carried out quickly if operational tempo is to be maintained. With this in mind the military planning problem of simultaneously routing multiple convoys between multiple origin and destination locations was formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem and used as a benchmark problem for investigating the applicability of a variety of optimisation methods to military decision making.
Intersections: Art inspired by maths at the Science Museum
The Telegraph numeracy campaign has a review of Intersections, an exhibition available at The Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum and at the Royal Society from 5 April to 20 June 2012, which “throws new light on the often overlooked common ground of art and maths”.
The article writes about Henry Moore, who drew inspiration from the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum while a student at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s.
What particularly fired Moore’s artistic imagination in this gallery was the collection of 19th-century “ruled surface models” – a rather opaque name for what are arrangements of strings, pulled taut between either wood or metal plates, which can then be adjusted to create complex three-dimensional shapes with exotic names like conoid, ellipsoid and cylindroid. They were built – primarily in a workshop in Munich – in an effort to make real for students of pure mathematics, as well as trainee engineers and architects, geometric forms that could otherwise only be expressed in abstract equations.
Gathering for Gardner 10 #g4g10
You may be aware that Gathering for Gardner 10 took place last week.