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: Posts By Peter Rowlett
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.
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.
All mathematical blogging to cease
The feeds at Mathblogging.org ran dry this morning following a realisation that every topic has now been covered.
The news prompted a major fall in the Mathblogging.org share price, sparking concerns about the aggregator’s future.
The news is particularly unwelcome for The Aperiodical, a blogging collaboration which is still yet to formally launch. The realisation came to light when the team behind The Aperiodical concluded that there was nothing new to blog about.
“We thought we could write a post about representing Sicherman dice as a different dissections of a diagram,” said Katie Steckles on behalf of the group, “but it’s been done”.
The team then thought they might write about the asymptotic distribution of a single eigenvalue gap of a Wigner matrix, a description of Nicolas Bourbaki’s wedding invitation or a story about a US President finding an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, but all have been written.
“We worked all through the night trying to think of ideas,” Steckles explained, “but came up blank. Every possible topic has been blogged somewhere, and there’s certainly no point in mathematics blogs repeating each other.”
So what now for the group? “We’ll just have to wait until someone invents some new mathematics.”
Until then, all mathematical blogging worldwide will cease and mathematical bloggers will have to find some other contribution to make. Some have announced plans to move down the xkcd purity scale until they find a subject that can be infinitely re-interpreted.