Yesterday, the @mathshistory Twitter feed tells me, was the anniversary of the birth of Julian Schwinger (1918-1994), one of the great physicists of the 20th century. (Technically I queued this tweet up but there are a lot of days and a lot of mathematicians to remember…) Schwinger is known to me particularly through his connection…
Ian Stewart on Black-Scholes
Ian Stewart gives us a taste of his new book Seventeen Equations That Changed the World in a Guardian article about the Black-Scholes equation. This, he says: provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run… It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming…
Math/Maths 85: Scientists vs. Investment Bankers
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Every odd integer larger than 1 is the sum of at most five primes; No pardon for Alan Turing; more super bowl math; Early results from the Met Office weather game; Trends in Race/Ethnicity and Gender Representation…
Met Office Weather Game – early results
Last summer the Met Office launched an online game to understand how best to present probabilities in weather forecasts. This game was collecting data for a project on perception of probabilities. The Met Office reports game was played more than 11,000 times. A blog post presents some initial findings: When faced with straightforward decisions, providing…
Wolfram|Alpha Pro
Stephen Wolfram writes what Wolfram|Alpha Pro does and what it will cost you. He says: Over the two and a half years since we first launched, Wolfram|Alpha has been growing rapidly in content and capabilities. But today’s introduction of Wolfram|Alpha Pro in effect adds a whole new model for interacting with Wolfram|Alpha—and brings all sorts…
Bridging the Mathematics Gap: your views
The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education have a call for views on post-16 education. This says: In a speech at the Royal Society in July 2011, the Secretary of State Michael Gove stated his wish that within ten years, all young people would be studying some form of mathematics post-16. ACME is seeking views on…
Every odd integer larger than 1 is the sum of at most five primes
Terence Tao has uploaded to the arXiv a paper “Every odd number greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes“, submitted to Mathematics of Computation. He says this result is: in the spirit of (though significantly weaker than) the even Goldbach conjecture (every even natural number is the sum of at most…