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…
Dance Your PhD: Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon
As a mathematician (and not just any kind of mathematician – a PURE mathematician), I heard of the “Dance Your PhD” contest and immediately burst out laughing. As much as there is some nice pure mathematical dancing out there (see, for instance, this series of videos of different numerical sorting algorithms interpreted through dance), the idea that…
Inverse problem tracking pollutants to a source: new algorithm developed
A paper published in the IOP journal Inverse Problems develops an algorithm that can take a sample of pollutants in a body of water and determine the rate at which the pollutant entered the body of water, and where the pollutant came from.
Carnival of Mathematics 88
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of June, is now online at cp’s mathem-o-blog. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
Turing centenary Turing Test results
A Turing Test – the biggest ever staged, according to New Scientist – took place on 23rd June at Bletchley Park to mark the Turing centenary. The test involved 150 conversations, 30 judges, 25 humans and five chatbots. The article points out that the Loebner Prize typically involves four judges and four chatbots. The contest…
Have they discovered the Higgs boson? Probably
I feel that we should acknowledge the announcement made at CERN this morning. As put by Brian Cox on Twitter: “ATLAS and CMS have independently discovered a new particle mass ~ 126 GeV which behaves like [the standard model] Higgs”. This is all based on statistical analysis of experimental data and, since the Higgs cannot…
Vocal signal processing method of testing for Parkinson’s disease
Mathematician Max Little has had some success diagnosing Parkinson’s disease by using signal processing algorithms to analyse the voice alone. Now the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative needs you – whether you have Parkinson’s or not – to donate three minutes to make a voice recording to add to their database and help improve the algorithm.