# You're reading: Posts Tagged: paper

### CLP reads “Non-sexist solution to the ménage problem”

I rediscovered this nice paper by Kenneth P. Bogart in my Interesting Esoterica collection, and decided to read through it. It turned out that, while the solution presented is very neat, there’s quite a bit of hard work to do to along the way. I’m not particularly experienced with combinatorics, so the little facts that the paper skips over took me quite a while to verify.

Once I was happy with the proof, I decided to record a video explaining how it works. Here it is:

### Fresh Turing preprints!

A couple of papers by Alan Turing have appeared on the arXiv.

No, that’s right – The Applications of Probability to Cryptography and The Statistics of Repetitions are two papers Turing wrote during the Second World War, and they’re now available on the arXiv, transcribed into modern LaTeX by Ian Taylor.

### Mathematical thinking and religious belief

According to this paper, published this week in Science, and described in this article from Psychology Today, the answer you give to the following simple maths question is a predictor of whether or not you are likely to be religious:

Q:  If a baseball and bat cost $\$110$, and the bat costs$\$100$ more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

### New model may explain leaf growth

Leaves don’t just grow equally in all directions, or they would have a regular shape. To understand how a few cells give rise to such complex structures as leaves is described in the abstract of a new paper in Science as “a major challenge in biology”.

The paper presents a new model that shows how leaf shape can arise through feedback between early patterns of oriented growth and tissue deformation, and some experimental evidence to support this model. Researchers filmed individual cells and tracked them as the plant grew. One of the researchers, Professor Enrico Coen, is quoted saying:

The model is not just based on drawings of leaf shape at different stages. To accurately recreate dynamic growth from bud to leaf, we had to establish the mathematical rules governing how leaf shapes are formed.

Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), who funded the research, is quoted saying:

This exciting research highlights the potential of using computer and mathematical models for biological research to help us tackle complex questions and make predictions for the future.