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It shows Babylonians knew about Pythagorean theorem centuries before Pythagoras was even alive!
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
Kepler published this conjecture in 1611. Now, the human mind and computer algorithms have managed to solve it.
An abstract mathematical model is unconsciously applied by rice farmers -- to great results.
Math is all around us.
A storm of maths.
It's all in the grain size.
Because cutting cake has to be perfect.
You now have a new excuse for failing math.
Mathematics is a very powerful tool to create beautiful works of art.
A 1 in 87 billion chance.
Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft chief, billionaire, scientist and patent creator recently published a study in which he claims NASA has made many fundamental errors in its analysis of asteroid data.
Random numbers are essential for cryptography and computer security. The problem is that algorithms don't really generate totally random numbers.
No matter how bad you are at math, you should be able to recognize an equation when you see it, right? Well, that wasn’t the case for a passenger on the plane from Philadelphia to Ontario. This passenger saw a saw a man “suspiciously” writing down a complicated looking formula on a piece of paper and notified […]
If you’re left-handed, some of the simplest and most mundane things can be an ordeal. Scissors are awful, musical instruments are a drag and house appliances can be quite challenging. But according to a new study, being a leftie is associated with better math skills, at least for teenage boys. The link between handedness was […]
Many people believe math is boring, but in reality - it's anything but.
For centuries, chocolatiers have been trying to develop the perfect chocolate coating for bonbons, honing their skill to the point of artistic performance. But scientists believe they can take things even further.
It's not who you think it is.
Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University published a paper recently that is leaving mathematicians scratching their heads. Their work exposed a mathematical bias of prime numbers in which a prime repels other would-be primes that end in the same digit. The researchers found some digits are 'preferred' in the detriment of others with various predilections. For instance, a prime ending in 9 is 65 percent likelier to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than one ending in 9.
A German astrophysicist decoded ancient Babylonian tablets stuffed with computations. His analysis reveals that these were used by the ancient scholars to predict where and when Jupiter would show up in the night's sky based on abstract computations so advanced they're indispensable to modern science. It's thought analytical geometry was invented at Oxford in the 14th century, but it seems the Babylonians had it covered more than 1,400 years earlier.
A supercomputer checked if a 22,338,618 digits long number is prime in less than 3 days. Here's how.
Computers at the University of Missouri hooked up to a special software that hunts for primes found the largest yet: a behemoth 22 million digits long.
Until the advent of calculus and computing infinite series, not that many digits were added to the ones found by Archimedes for more than a 1,500 years.
The problem is still unsolved.
By 1918, the Indian born, self-thought mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was already making headlines all over the world, recognized as one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time. He was born into a poor Brahman family and with no formal education. Luckily he came across a couple of textbook maths, and since he didn’t […]
Temari (手まり?) balls are an ancient form of art that originated in China and got was introduced to Japan around the 7th century A.D., where it became very popular.
Both bathroom decorators and mathematicians have a reason to rejoice (how often does that happen?). Using a computer algorithm, a group of mathematicians at the University of Washington Bothell discovered the 15th kind of pentagon that can tile in a plane. The 14th was discovered in 1985 by mathematician Rolf Stein, while the previous five before were proven by Majorie Rice, a housewife from San Diego.
In a recent TED talk, Hannah Fry outlines a mathematical formula that predicts long-lasting relationships. In her recent book, The Mathematics of Love, she discusses the findings of psychologist John Gottman who studied hundreds of couples over many years to find out what sets apart the happy couples from the miserable. Gottman than enlisted the help of a mathematician who correlated all the data the psychologists gathered and came up with an empirical formula that seems to predict if a couple will be happy together.
In 2002, Jason Padgett was brutally attacked outside a karaoke bar, getting a brain concussion and a severe case of PTSD. But this may have actually been the best thing that happened to him - the brain injury turned him into a mathematical genius, and made him see the world differently, through a geometrical lens.
Whether we see them in math or in real life biology (or architecture, or art), fractals are just awesome. In case you don’t know, a fractal is a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. Basically, a fractal is a similar, never-ending pattern. No matteer how you zoom in or out, you end up with a […]
Here's a question: what's the difference between actor Sean Penn and the charitable Mother Theresa? Bear with me for a second. Here's a bit of context: following the onslaught left by Hurricane Katrina, Penn hurried to New Orleans to aid victims. Allegedly has has personally saved 40 people. Today, however, he's scorned and mocked of because he also brought a camera crew and publicist along for the ride to document his humanitarian effort. Both Mother Theresa and Sean Penn have engaged in what can be described as humanitarian aid, yet one's seen as a saint, while the other is made fun of. The key difference is motivation and now game theory may finally be able to account for it.
Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University, Japan claims he has proven the ABC conjecture, one of the longest standing mysteries of mathematics. However, even though his 500-page paper was published in 2012, no one has managed to understand it. Mochizuki says his fellow mathematicians are failing to get to grips with his work.
Globalization certainly has its ups: new markets, free trade, travel or economic growth (especially for developing nations). It's this latter aspect of globalization that might be the dominant factor that's wiping out languages from the face of the world, according to a study by researchers at University of Cambridge.
Researchers at Swansea University, UK and Uppsala University in Sweden built a mathematical model that explains how one single sheepdog can round up herds made of up to 100 sheep. Their conclusion suggests that the dog needs only to follow two simple mathematical rules.
Maryam Mirzakhani, who was born and raised in Iran, has been awarded the highest honour a mathematician can attain: the Fields Medal. It’s one of those moments which will go down in history – for the first time in almos 80 years, a woman has won the Fields Medal (officially known as the International Medal […]
Sometimes, we go through situations thinking when we reach the end of the road the outcome will feel gloom. But sometimes, the exact opposite happens and we're flooded with absolute joy, the kind of which we couldn't have experienced were we to expect that outcome. In a word, this is called surprise.
Scientists successfully predicted human happiness using a mathematical equation - you too can use the smartphone app they developed and be a part of the experiment.
University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design (ICD) is a state of the art research facility that seeks to solve complex structural problems by mimicking nature. Every year, the institute demonstrates how natural biological constructions can be used to solve design problems by building a new research wing. The results are nothing short of breath taking. […]
French researchers say they are close to developing seismic ‘invisibility cloaks’ which would cancel out potentially hazardous earthquake shockwaves, protecting key buildings or even entire cities. Nuclear power plants especially, and potentially entire cities could be cloaked using this technology – if the researchers’ theories are true (which seems highly likely). They believe that by drilling boreholes […]
It’s long been supposed that monkeys are capable of mental arithmetics, but it was only recently that this was proven for a fact by neuroscientists at the Margaret Livingstone of Harvard Medical School in Boston. The researchers taught three rhesus macaques to identify symbols representing the numbers zero to 25, then when given the choice […]
Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a much deeper understanding of the concepts and methods discussed, according to new research from University of Chicago’s Department of Psychology. It’s already a pretty much accepted fact that gesturing accentuates children learning – it was already established by several studies that gestures […]
If you’re a sci-fi geek like me, you’ve most likely read at least a few Asimov novels, and you know what psychohistory is – a fictional science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people. Now, researchers have made important steps towards […]
New research shows that negative absolute temperatures and perpetual motion machines are still out of reach, no matter how you tackle it, and no matter how small you try to make it. The concept of a perpetual motion machine has been an enticing one since it was first thought of. Unfortunately, it’s doomed to fail […]
A recent study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology aims to overthrow the long standing assumption that being good at most forms of math is an innate ability. The researchers found that if you want to be good at multiple types of mathematics, you need to practice them all since relying on one good […]
Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a new study shows that the system might have actually been invented way before that, in the 1400s, by people of the tiny Pacific […]
The world is getting smaller by the day, as fixed geographical distances become easier and more accessible for the common folk to travel. What this means is that a lot of things change as well, including the day diseases are carrier and spread throughout the world. Only a century ago, the number one mean of […]
Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and India’s Viswanathan Anand are duking it out in the world championship, apparently, without anyone else contesting their supremacy. But as insanely good as they are, they still can’t stand up to the best computers today. As a matter of fact, there is one theory which, if proven, could pretty much spoil […]
In science we have what are called “laws”, be them Newton’s Laws of Motion or Archimedes’ Principle, because these mathematical expressions describe systems in a rigid set of boundaries, essentially helping predict how these systems will behave in the future. What about overly complex, highly dynamic systems; could we use a single mathematical equation to […]
What you’re seeing above is the Hofstadter’s butterfly – a mathematical object describing the theorised behaviour of electrons in a strong magnetic field. It took physicists 40 years, but they have finally found experimental evidence that the model, proposed in 1976 by Douglas Hofstadter is valid. Thing is, to catch this kind of fractal butterfly, […]
A 52-year-old, part-time graduate student with no previous training in psychology and little training in math aside from high-school has discredited a very cited paper published in 2005 in American Psychologist. The paper, then written by Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada suggested a mathematical ratio between positivity and happiness, claiming that humans thrive when ratio […]
