The IMA have announced a competition connected to the 54th British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) which took place last month at University College London. Four prizes of £100 are available for the best reports of between 500 and 1,500 words by attendees at the recent BAMC who are students or completed their PhDs within the past five years. You are encouraged to write about a talk you have seen or your experience of being at BAMC. Further details are given on the IMA website at: Win a £100 prize!
You're reading: Monthly Archives: April 2012
Electoral reforms and non-transitive dice
Guest post by Andrew, of Manchester MathsJam. Andrew can be found on Twitter as @andrew_taylor and blogs occasionally about maths, among other things, at andrewt.net.
“Grime Dice” are a set of five coloured dice with unusual combinations of numbers on them. The red die, for example, has five fours and a nine. The blue one has three twos and three sevens, so it loses to the red die about 58% of the time. The green die has five fives and a zero, and will lose to the blue one in 58% of rolls. What makes them interesting is that the green die will beat the red one in 69% of rolls. These three dice behave rather like rock-paper-scissors — in mathematical terms, they are ‘non-transitive’. The full set of Grime Dice also has a purple and a yellow die, so a better analogy would be rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock.
Labyrinth salt installation by Motoi Yamamoto
Press release mayhem
On Google+ (sadly in a post with limited visibility, so I can’t link directly to it), Rongmin Lu (via David Roberts) highlights a case of “american whispers”, where a piece of research is helped along by press releases and media paraphrasing to become a completely different result.
Here’s how American whispers works:
1. You publish a paper, say on a new approximation to the discrete Fourier transform. To show the relevance of your work, you then say something like your new algorithm “improve[s] over the Fast Fourier Transform”.
2. Next, your institution’s press office issues a press release. To make it sound fun, they come up with a snazzy title “Faster-than-fast Fourier transform”. Pretty neat, huh?
3. Finally, some news website picks it up and then, suddenly, it’s all about “a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms”. Ta-da!
I think you’d all agree that it’s way better than Chinese whispers.
Sergey Ten commented, saying that the press release in question wasn’t too bad, and mentions the idea that “random” data from real-world measurements is usually spread around a manifold of lower dimension than the sample space, which I think is the idea behind the paper Barcodes: the persistent topology of data, which I linked to in my last Interesting Esoterica summation.
On a similar note, Nalini Joshi points out that it isn’t news when centuries-old maths is used to solve a new problem: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-combining-centuries-old-mathematical-theorems-efficient.html
Update: Rongmin’s original post is hidden to the public, so I’ve pasted it in here. I hope the limited visibility was a side-effect of the way Google+ works and not a deliberate decision to restrict the post’s audience.
Laziest torus identified
Or, in similarly simplified headlinese, “Math finds the best doughnut”. A little bit more precisely, Fernando C. Marques and André Neves claim in a preprint on the arXiv to have proved the Willmore conjecture, that the minimum achievable mean curvature of a torus is $\frac{2}{\pi^2}$.
The article I linked to is some surprisingly non-stupid coverage from the Huffington Post. It seems they have a maths professor writing a column. I will never understand that site. I don’t know if there’s a Serious Business way of framing this, but the result is nice to know.
Richard Elwes has written a very short post on Google+ with some more real-maths information about what’s going on.
John Wood & Paul Harrison “One more kilometre”
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/37796909]
Look at the fluid dynamics!
MathsJam March 2012 Photos
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