We’re getting bigger: “It will be harder to feed 9 billion people in 2050 than it would be today.”
Gemini Research News has some bad news for the Earth’s growing population. It turns out that our farms will face some trouble because we’re going […]
mathematics
Statistics are complicated, right? Well, thinking that is why we tend to get misled.
Ars Technica keeps it simple, smart, with a new study that shows why statistics can be the third kind of lie* – sometimes the hard […]
Alan Turing’s idea makes water three times cleaner.
Nature reports on a water filter based on computer pioneer Alan Turing’s only biology paper that appears to clean salt out of water three times […]
Science Art: Representations of the Braid Groups by Nancy Scherich, overall winner, Dance Your Ph.D. 2017.
“A representation is faithful if it has only one braid in its kernel.” So, this is doctorate-level mathematics rendered as interpretative dance, and that is […]
Science Art: Belt Trick by Jason Hise
The belts always twist, but never get tangled. Geometry can be weird. If you find this hypnotic, check out what the same creator has done […]
Why are American kids getting so good at higher math?
The Atlantic investigates the social movement behind America’s recent surprise win at the international Math Olympiad: You wouldn’t see it in most classrooms, you wouldn’t […]
Science Art: Contour plot of Rastrigin’s function in two variables, by Tos
Click to embiggen I don’t have the math language to explain what’s going on here very well. It’s a diagram of the Rastrigin function, which […]
Beyond “We can all agree on cheese”: Higher pizza-cutting mathematics.
New Scientist delves into the advanced mapping of pizza slicing for *everyone’s* preferences: Most of us divide a pizza using straight cuts that all meet […]
The third kind of lie: science vs. p-hacking.
Fusion goes beyond the three kinds of lies (“Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” according to… someone) and into the awful implications of trusting the data […]
SONG: One (is the Loneliest Number) (penitential cover)
SONG: “One (Is The Loneliest Number)”. ARTIST: grant, featuring Sebastian Balfour. (Originally by Harry Nilsson.) SOURCE: It doesn’t have a research source. It’s a penitential […]
Viral science – things that spread fast.
Nature skips past the blue-and-black dress to ask: Have you seen the one about viral scholarship?: In a paper due to appear in Management Science, […]
Science Art: D ß ist der schneck auß dem grund…, by Albrecht Duerer, from Four Books on Measurement (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt)
Click to embiggen The full title of this appears to be: “D ß ist der schneck auß dem grund auf gezogen/mit allen notwendigen linien drauß […]
Gödel music composition to debut at Gödel Prize celebration.
Nature has more on the suitably self-recursive premiere of a uniquely mathematical piece of music: The piece, “The Hilbert Heartbreak Hotel” by Danish composer Niels […]
Ant colonies are smarter than Google.
When it comes to finding new information, The Independent reports, those crazy, criss-crossing paths that ants take are more efficient than Google at processing new […]
1 in 25 Death Row inmates don’t belong there.
Or so says a new analysis published in Nature. That’s 4% of condemned people who would be exonerated given enough time: Few convictions result in […]