# You're reading: Posts Tagged: maths in the news

### Where could you (or your rich pal) give everyone $1 million? Recently someone on Twitter, and then two people on US cable news, said that Michael Bloomberg could have used the \$500 million he spent on his presidential campaign to give everyone in the USA \$1 million. This caused quite a fuss. In short, someone divided 500 by 327, saw that the answer was bigger than 1 and the units were “millions”, and concluded that the money could instead have been distributed to give everyone \$1 million.

That’s an easy mistake to make for someone writing a tweet, but the kind of error that should have made someone think “does that make sense?” before planning a segment on TV news about it.

It’s raised a couple of interesting questions, though:

• If that money was shared between every American citizen, how much would each one get?
• If Michael Bloomberg wanted to give \$1 million to everyone in a smaller area, where could he choose? I realised that all the data I need is freely available on the internet, so I made a website to do the calculations for you: make-it-rain-bloomberg.glitch.me It asks you how much money you’ve got, then for every power of 10 dollars, it tells you where in the USA you could give every resident that much. To give you an idea of how far the net worths of people like Michael Bloomberg could go, it’s got a list of shortcuts for billionaires. Appropriately, I got that data from Bloomberg’s own website. Bloomberg himself was mysteriously missing from the list, so I got his net worth from Google and added it in myself. The most unexpected thing for me was seeing how much money these people would have left over after giving everyone in the USA \$100. They’d still be enormously, unimaginably rich!

I’ll describe a few of the fiddly details of the implementation now. At first the “how much money have you got?” input was a text field, but I realised it’d be much better to have a slider that you can swing from \$1 all the way up to \$1 trillion. It’s a logarithmic scale, so powers of 10 are equally spaced.

I got data on the populations of US cities and states from data.census.gov.

Working out which amounts and places to show you wasn’t completely straightforward. I thought it’d be easiest to fix the amounts given away to a power of 10 per person, and to find places where the population meant that the amount left over would be as small as possible. To do that, my code works through the list of places in ascending order of population, and stops at the last place whose population is big enough to give everyone at least the target amount.

I enjoyed making this tool, and I hope it helps somebody get a better feel for what these big numbers mean.

### Gerrymandering Gives Mathematics’s Moon a Day in the Sun

If you pay attention to United States politics you have probably noticed that mathematics is currently enjoying a rare moment of relevance. You probably also know this is not happening because all of a sudden politicians have decided that mathematics is clearly the coolest thing in the world, even though it clearly is, but instead because gerrymandering has become one of the major issues du jour.

### When numbers aren’t neutral: the hidden politics of budget calculators

The BBC News Budget 2017 calculator

The day after last week’s budget, I logged onto the BBC News website and clicked on their budget calculator to find out if I was a winner or a loser. The questions are pretty simple: first off, it asks how much you drink, smoke and drive, and then it asks how much you earn, plus a few bits and bobs to cover technicalities. Then, it spits out an answer: did Phil leave you feeling flush, was it more of a hammering at the hands of Hammond? I came away £8 a month better off…and significantly angrier than I expected.

### #thatlogicproblem round-up

C: $K_A m; \\ K_B d.$

A: $\neg K_A d; \\ m \vDash \neg K_B m.$

B: $d \not\vDash K_B m; \\ (K_A(\neg K_B m)) \vDash K_B (m,d).$

A: $m \wedge K_B(m,d) \vDash K_A (m,d).$

Albert, Bernard and Cheryl have had a busy week. They’re the stars of #thatlogicproblem, a question from a Singapore maths test that was posted to Facebook by a TV presenter and quickly sent the internet deduction-crazy.

First of all: no, it’s not meant to be answered by an average Singaporean student. It’s a hard question from a schools Olympiad test.

### All Squared, Number 10: Maths journalism

Evelyn Lamb is a professional mathematician who has taken up journalism on the side. She received the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship last year, and spent the summer writing for the magazine Scientific American. We talked to her about maths journalism, the challenges involved in making advances accessible to a wider audience, and the differences between blogging and print journalism.

### Not mentioned recently on The Aperiodical

Summer is a busy time for this site’s hard-working triumvirate, so we haven’t been keeping on top of the news as much as we’d like. There’s been some quite interesting news, so here’s a quick round-up of the most important bits:

### Here’s How Little I See Your Point

You may have seen an article linked to last week, written by Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic. The article was titled ‘Here’s How Little Math Americans Actually Use At Work‘, although mysteriously this journalist makes use of some mathematical analysis of survey data, and not only that, the data appears to show that 94% of Americans claim to use mathematics as part of their daily job.

The article discusses people’s misconceptions about the future utility of what they were learning, as well as the divide between using ‘any math’ and ‘advanced math’, which includes calculus, algebra and statistics. The number of Americans who admitted to using this type of maths appears to drop off once you get to anything more complicated than fractions, and also presented is an analysis of this divide by job type.

A very well-written and thoughtful response to this has already been posted at mathematics professor Bret Benesh’s blog, which gives four reasons why the article annoyed him (and probably several other people too).