May 31, 2004
Mathematics with a moralBy ROBERT OSSERMAN The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales -- regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all -- into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen by such glamorous stars as Mary-Louise Parker, Matt Damon, and Russell Crowe. True, the dramatized mathematicians were generally troubled, but they were geniuses and ultimately sympathetic. Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog? There may have been two kisses, one from inside and the other from outside the world of mathematics. The external kiss came first, in the spring of 1993, with the debut of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, which depicted mathematical genius in the guise of an appealing 13-year-old girl full of adolescent exuberance, saucy humor, and high spirits. The opening scene of the play refers to Fermat's Last Theorem, already a famous problem in 1809, when the scene takes place, and by 1993 considered the most famous unsolved problem in all of mathematics. Just two months after the play opened came the kiss from within, as Andrew Wiles announced that he had finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem. The formerly obscure realm of mathematical research made the front pages of newspapers around the world, and the real-life fairy tale of Wiles's seven-year struggle with the proof was portrayed on television and in books, reaching what may have been the height of unreality as he and his wife watched themselves depicted as the lead characters in a New York musical, Fermat's Last Tango. Last year the mathematical world was again astir with the announcement by a Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, that he had solved another of the great open problems in mathematics, the century-old Poincaré conjecture. The story of that problem and the rather roundabout route to its solution (still to be fully confirmed) has its own fairy-tale aspects, including a moral or two. To match the transformation of mathematics, princely sums have been attached to certain mathematical investigations. In Paris in 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute announced its offer of $1-million each for the solution of seven mathematical problems, among them the Poincaré conjecture. In addition to Poincaré, two other math-ematicians play key roles in our tale: Bernhard Riemann, whose radical rethinking of the foundations of geometry in 1854 would eventually lead to the solution of the Poincaré conjecture, and William P. Thurston, whose work provided the essential ingredients for connecting the ideas of Riemann with the conjecture of Poincaré. What all three have in common is a fertile mathematical imagination -- more specifically, a remarkable geometric vision. In the division sometimes made between mathematicians who are primarily problem solvers and those who are theory builders, these three would all fall into the theory-building category. They also offered solutions to major open problems, but their solutions were often challenged as incomplete, while the innovations they presented opened up whole new fields of research. In the case of Riemann, one innovation was the notion of a Riemann surface, a surface that somehow passes through itself without intersecting itself. The concept turned out to be useful in a variety of applications, including aerodynamics and string theory. The specific connection to the Poincaré conjecture came from Riemann's 1854 lecture on geometry, in which he swept away the framework of Euclidean geometry and laid the foundations for what is now known as Riemannian geometry. For example, rather than start with straight lines as one of the building blocks of the field, Riemann asked what are the straightest possible lines -- called "geodesics" -- and what properties they have. Whether or not they are truly straight depends on a key property that he called "curvature." Those notions are not idle speculations or pure abstractions; Riemann was motivated by a desire to understand the geometric nature of the space we live in -- nothing short of the shape of the universe. Using his notion of curvature, he wrote equations for three basic shapes. One of them is flat space, where the curvature is zero and the geometry is the familiar one of Euclid. The second has negative curvature and is now known as "hyperbolic space." It has played an increasingly central role in various parts of mathematics, as well as being favored in some circles as the most likely candidate for the present shape of the universe. The third, with positive curvature, is perhaps the most important. Called "the hypersphere," it was both Einstein's preferred choice for the present shape of the universe and the closest model to what Riemann himself was talking about: the observable universe, or what we see when we look out in space and back in time toward the Big Bang. Riemann's remarkable vision included not only three-dimensional spaces but also curved spaces of four or more dimensions. As with his self-penetrating Riemann surfaces, the higher-dimensional curved spaces seemed like science fiction at the time, but they became the core of Einstein's general theory of relativity as well as a key component of modern string theory. Henri Poincaré is sometimes described as the last universal mathematician -- the last one to make fundamental contributions across the spectrum of both pure and applied mathematics. Among those contributions was a new branch of mathematics, one that was to be a major focus of 20th-century research: algebraic topology. Like Riemann, Poincaré looked at spaces of all dimensions, but he was interested in their coarse -- or global -- structure, rather than in their fine structure, described by quantities like curvature. Topology is a kind of broad-stroke geometry. It is interested in overall shape, not the fine points. A topologist wants to know if your house completely encloses an inner courtyard, not whether the courtyard is rectangular or circular. Although the lack of emphasis on details might suggest that topology is too imprecise to form the basis of a mathematical theory, it is important because the first step in understanding a geometric shape -- whether a strand of DNA or the entire universe -- is often to determine the overall form. Poincaré devised several ways to assign a set of numbers or algebraic quantities to geometric figures and spaces, in the hope of making it possible to describe the overall or global shape of any space in terms of those quantities. His famous conjecture had to do with a proposed way to characterize the shape of spherical space. During the 20th century, as mathematicians studied the possible shapes of spaces of all dimensions, a curious fact emerged. Two-dimensional spaces, called "surfaces," could be classified quite well, and spaces of four or more dimensions turned out in some ways to be more tractable than the three-dimensional spaces in which we actually live. Perhaps most surprising, by 1982 Poincaré's conjecture had been proved to be true in all dimensions except three, where it remained an open question. In the meanwhile, the continuing intensive study of three-dimensional spaces uncovered a bewildering profusion of possible shapes. William Thurston's great contribution was to see a way to systematize all those shapes -- to provide a kind of periodic table with which to classify and organize all possibilities, as built up out of components based on the original positively and negatively shaped geometries of Riemann, together with a few other basic types. Thurston was able to prove only a part of that classification; the rest remained perhaps the most important open problem in geometry and topology: the Thurston geometrization conjecture. As one measure of its scope, the Poincaré conjecture was subsumed as merely a special a University. The expression "seems to have succeeded" is shorthand for a rather complicated and unusual situation. Grigori Perelman announced in 2003 that he had proved the Thurston geometric conjecture and would present the proof in a series of three papers that he would make available electronically as they were finished. By late 2003, two of the three papers had been posted and had become the object of intensive study by geometers and topologists around the world. In December two mathematical institutes in the San Francisco Bay area -- the American Institute of Mathematics, in Palo Alto, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, in Berkeley -- held weeklong symposia to examine in detail the components of Perelman's work, as well as additional results inspired by his methods. As happened when Wiles proposed his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, the experts quickly agreed that whether or not all the parts checked out, Perelman had made important advances that were bound to be of great value for further progress. Unlike Wiles, who chose to keep his work confidential until it was all checked out, Perelman had decided to post his calculations on the Web as he went along. That allowed many other mathematicians to try to develop their own proofs of the remaining pieces. In particular, even without his final paper, which is designed to give a proof of the complete Thurston conjecture, Perelman has provided an argument that will resolve the Poincaré conjecture -- as have Tobias Colding, of New York University, and William Minicozzi, of the Johns Hopkins University, in a paper that uses an alternative argument together with the work in Perelman's first two papers. The moral of the story? There are at least two. First, a curious fact of mathematical life: When faced with a problem that seems intractable, the best strategy is sometimes to formulate what appears to be an even harder problem. By expanding one's horizons, one may find an unanticipated route that leads to the goal. Second, mathematicians are often thought of as working in isolation, and that is occasionally the case, as with Andrew Wiles and his solitary struggle to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. But usually mathematics is a highly social activity, with collaboration between two or more individuals the rule rather than the exception. In fact, institutes like the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute are based on the premise that fostering collaborative research is one of the most fruitful ways to advance the discipline. Even when an individual takes the last step in solving a problem, the solution invariably depends on elaborate groundwork laid by others -- as is clearly the case with the solution of the Poincaré conjecture. Robert Osserman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford University, is special-projects director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, in Berkeley, Calif. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 33, Page B10 Mathematics with a moral |
May 30, 2004
Social physics sheds some light on our political choicesScientists can now tell us how stars burn and how cells reproduce, but are we any closer to understanding how society works? Or is ''social science'' still an oxymoron? Perhaps we should first ask whether, even if a scientific theory of society were possible, it's something we really want. Such ideas are often floated at the scarier extremes of the left and right, where they acquire a totalitarian odor. The earliest attempt to create a ''physics of society,'' by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, is not a good advertisement. Hobbes used Galileo's physics to argue that the best society is a monarchical dictatorship. But there is a long tradition that associates a rationalistic social science with Enlightenment liberalism: John Locke, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill shared the belief that there are ''natural laws'' governing society, and that these might be uncovered by systematic enquiry, just as Isaac Newton divined the laws that direct the planets. That tradition is now back in fashion — and this time there's some heavy-duty science going into it. Researchers from a recondite and hitherto underpublicized discipline called statistical physics are bringing their formidable theoretical tools and computational techniques to bear on issues that seem a long way from physics: voting procedures, the waxing and waning of the economy, traffic flow and pedestrian motion, the demographics of marriage and crime, the conflict of nations. Social physics does tend to brush away some romantic illusions about a free society. The statistics of democratic elections, for instance, indicate that they are not simply determined by the sum of independent choices among the electorate. Instead, they show a mathematical pattern that physicists recognize as the signature of systems of strongly interacting components, which is to say that choices are not independent but highly interdependent. Our choices are influenced by many elements — our friends and neighbors, for example — and physicists have found that strongly interacting systems like this are prone to ''avalanches,'' so that even tiny influences may engender big effects. Might, say, media bias in campaigns be even more of a factor than we think? As we uncover more of the ''interaction rules'' underlying social phenomena, we should be able to predict the effect of changing those rules and thus formulate public policies more likely to achieve their objectives. We might be able to design better driving regulations; more ambitiously, we might hope to gauge such things as the effects of regulations on the performance of economic markets. That is the potential value of a physics of society: Rather than persuading us that things must be the way they are, it could show us the best way to reach a goal. Of course, science cannot tell us what that goal should be; there we must appeal to our sense of justice, equality and ethical values. That, perhaps, is the hardest part. Philip Ball is the author of ''Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another.'' Social physics sheds some light on our political choices |
May 29, 2004
In the eye of the sunThe heavens are about to witness a very rare event with a special resonance for Australia, writes Richard Macey. Something no living person has ever seen is about to happen. When it occurred centuries ago, nations dispatched expeditions to watch from far-flung corners of the world. It even led to the European discovery of the east coast of Australia. On June 8, a small black dot will appear on the face of the sun, just after 3pm. It will be the planet Venus performing what astronomers call a transit. And it will be only the sixth time the event has been witnessed. In his book Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, the German mathematician and astronomer Johann Kepler made a prediction. On December 6, 1631, he calculated, Venus would pass directly between the sun and the Earth. He urged astronomers to keep an eye out. Kepler died in 1630, but on the predicted day, Frenchman Pierre Gassendi watched from Paris. He saw nothing but clouds. What Gassendi did not know was that the celestial event happened during his night, with the astronomer on the wrong side of the world. But transits of Venus happen in a curious pattern - none for more than a century, then another just a few years later. Jeremiah Horrocks, a teacher living in the Lancashire village of Much Hoole, calculated there would be another on Sunday, December 4, 1639. To ensure clouds did not spoil his observations, Horrocks wrote to his friend in Manchester, William Crabtree, asking him to also watch the sun. Despite bad weather, and having to break away for his official Sunday duties at his church, Horrocks glimpsed the transit for about half-an-hour before sunset. Next month's transit, says Lomb, will be best viewed from Europe or Africa. Unfortunately for Sydney, the sun will set while Venus is still travelling across its face. "We will only see the beginning," he says. The planet Venus will appear to make contact with the edge of the sun at 3.07pm. Another 19 minutes will pass until "second contact" takes place - when the planet's trailing edge touches the solar disc. The show will be over at 4.53pm when the sun sets. For Sydneysiders who miss it, says Lomb, another transit of Venus will begin at 8.16am on June 7, 2012. After that, the next one won't happen until December, 2117. In the eye of the sun |
May 29, 2004
Blast victim has future in safe handsRADHA VENKATESAN Two years ago, a hand grenade nearly shattered 13-year-old Malvika Iyer’s life. Her hands were blown off, and she was bed-ridden. Today, media scribes swarm her house in Chennai, and top political leaders pose with her. The reason? Despite losing both her hands in the explosion, she has scored centum in Mathematics and Science subjects in the Tamil Nadu State Board 10th standard public examination. And not just that. In all, she has scored 483 marks out of 500. Just 12 marks short of becoming this year’s topscorer in Tamil Nadu. After the results were out yesterday, her mobile phone has not stopped ringing. And with her myo-electric hand, she keeps buzzing SMS messages to her friends and relatives. ‘‘She is much faster on the SMS than most of us,’’ declares her aunt, Kalpana. Blast victim has future in safe hands |
May 29, 2004
The Key to a Good Math Teacher? Insight on ErrorExperts Say Best Instructors Spot Where Students Go WrongResearch shows that teachers with degrees in the subjects they teach are more successful. That's the reason behind teacher-certification requirements in the federal No Child Left Behind education law. But as Robert Frederick reports, not all mathematicians are successful math teachers. Most could use some help in becoming calculating sleuths. Education experts note that most advanced math programs are geared toward theoretical as opposed to practical instruction. It's not enough to know math, says Judith Ramaley of the National Science Foundation. Teachers "also need to understand how the minds of young people work, and how to diagnose… the kinds of tangles kids get into," she says. See if you can spot where students stumbled in the three sample math problems at left. The Key to a Good Math Teacher? Insight on Error |
May 28, 2004
Chemists make molecular interlocked ringsContact: Stuart Wolpert UCLA chemists have devised an elegant solution to an intricate problem at the nanoscale that stumped scientists for many years: They have made a mechanically interlocked compound whose molecules have the topology of the beloved interlocked Borromean rings. In the May 28 issue of the journal Science, the team reports nanoscience that could be described as art. The UCLA group is the first to achieve this goal in total chemical synthesis, which research groups worldwide have been pursuing. Named for a noble Italian family, the Borromean rings first appeared on the family's coat of arms in the 15th century. Examples of the rings can be seen in buildings on three islands in northern Italy's Lake Maggiore, which are still owned by the Borromeo family. The Borromean link comprises three interlocked rings that form one inseparable union such that cutting any one ring results in the other two falling apart. "This is nanoscience, but also much more," said Fraser Stoddart, UCLA's Fred Kavli Professor of Nanosystems Sciences and director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. "The Borromean Rings pervade art, theology, mythology and heraldry, as well as mathematics, physics and chemistry. Go to the Google search engine and you are confronted with more than 2,000 hits." "The realization of the Borromean link in a wholly synthetic molecular form has long been regarded as the most ambitious and challenging target in topological chemistry -- a Gordian knot," Stoddart said. "The near-quantitative assembly of this topological link from 18 components by templation around six metals of six organic pieces with two 'teeth' and another six with three 'teeth' to grip the metals, resulting in the intermittent opening and closing of 12 carbon-nitrogen double bonds, cuts this Gordian knot once and for all." (An ancient Greek oracle foretold that whoever untied the intricate Gordian knot, a knot with no ends exposed, would rule all of Asia. The problem resisted all attempted solutions until 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great is said to have cut through the knot with his sword.) More than 30 years ago, Robert Woodward at Harvard and Albert Eschenmoser at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich created Vitamin B12 chemically in a laboratory, a triumph of chemical synthesis, Stoddart noted. "Similarly, during the past decade, a total synthesis of Borromean rings in a molecular form has become the Herculean challenge in contemporary synthesis, where Darwinian selection operates in a chemically evolving system," he said. Chichak obtained X-ray-quality single crystals from which postdoctoral fellow Gareth Cave solved the structure in the laboratory of Jerry Atwood, chemistry professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Each molecule of the Borromean ring compound is 2.5 nanometers across and contains an inner chamber that is a quarter of a cubic nanometer in volume and is lined by 12 oxygen atoms. "When your mind turns to potential applications, the molecule has so much going for it," Stoddart said. "Now that we are addressing what they might do for us, the list becomes endless," Chichak said. "When all is said and done, the molecular Borromean rings should be judged by their magnificent looks at this early stage in their existence," Stoddart said. "As one of the reviewers of the original manuscript wrote, 'The beauty of the molecular structure is really breathtaking.'" Chemists make molecular interlocked rings |
May 28, 2004
Physicists tackle EU constitutionBelle Dumé Two scientists from Poland claim to have found a solution to the problem of voting in the newly enlarged European Union. The current voting system, which is based on guidelines set by the Treaty of Nice, and the new system proposed in the draft EU Constitution both lead to inequalities between the different member states. The new system, proposed by Karol Zyczkowski and Wojciech Slomczynski of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, is based on a square-root formula and would ensure that all European citizens had equal voting powers (arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0405396). The treaty of Nice, which came into force in February 2003, is unfair and irrational in the opinion of Zyczkowski and Slomczynski. For instance, it gives Germany, which has a population in excess of 82 million, the same number of votes (29) in the European Parliament as Italy, which only has around 57 million inhabitants. Moreover, Poland receives 27 votes despite having a population of only 38 million. Moreover, the draft Constitution -- which calls for the Nice system to be replaced in 2009 -- seems to favour the largest and smallest countries in the EU at the expense of medium-sized countries such as Poland and Spain. Zyczkowski, a physicist, and Slomczynski, a mathematician, developed a voting scheme based on the so-called Penrose Law, which states that the voting weight of a country is directly proportional to the square root of its population. This approach was pioneered by the English psychiatrist and mathematician Lionel S Penrose, father of the scientists Roger and Oliver and the chess player Jonathan. Zyczkowski and Slomczynski calculated that all citizens would have the same voting power if new laws required the support of 62% of the total EU population in votes at the European Parliament. Such a system would also give more power to smaller countries while safeguarding the rights of larger states. Under the proposed system the number of votes that each country has in the European parliament would be proportional to the square root of its population. The Polish duo say their system is a compromise between the conflicting interests of the bigger states -- France, Germany, Italy and the UK -- that favour the draft Constitution and medium-sized countries such as Poland and Spain who prefer the Nice Treaty. Furthermore, the scheme could easily be extended to accommodate new member states in the future. "It is difficult to predict, however, to what extent politicians would be interested in accepting such a system," Zyczkowski told PhysicsWeb. Physicists tackle EU constitution |
May 28, 2004
Two Chinese win 'nobel Prize of East'A Hong Kong-born medical scientist and a mainland mathematician have become the first two Chinese to win the newly-established science award, the Shaw Prize. The prize was established by Hong Kong television and movie mogul Run Run Shaw in November 2002. The annual prize consists of three categories: astronomy, life and science and medicine, and mathematical sciences. Each prize comes with a monetary award of US$1 million. More than 200 scientists were nominated this year, the first time the prize was awarded. Three prize committees and an adjudication board headed by Professor Yang Chen-ning, the 1957 Nobel Laureate for physics, made the selection. Two prizes were awarded in the category of life science and medicine this year. Chern Shiing-shen of Nankai University won the prize in the field of mathematical sciences. He was honoured for his initiation of the field of global differential geometry and his contribution to the development of mathematics in the last 60 years. Canadian physicist and Princeton University professor, P. James E. Peebles, won the award in the field of astronomy for his achievement in cosmology and astrophysics. The Shaw Prize presentation ceremony will take place in Hong Kong in September. The winners are obligated to hold forums in at least one university in China and share their knowledge. The Shaw Prize aims to honour scientists regardless of race, nationality and religious belief who have made significant breakthroughs and whose work has resulted in a profound impact for mankind. The 96-year-old founder has been the chairman of Television Broadcast Ltd for more than 30 years. Two Chinese win 'nobel Prize of East' |
May 27, 2004
Catching a fraudster's eyeKelly Mills NRMA Insurance has introduced iris recognition technology at one of its auction centres to reduce fraud and speed up the registration process. Customers of the Smithfield salvage centre in Sydney, which auctions written-off vehicles, will have two months to register a digital photograph of their iris before it will become a compulsory condition of entry. Personal information such as name and driver's licence particulars - the current form of registration - were stored on a separate system, said NRMA head of fraud and security risk Nola Watson. "Our auction patrons' iris photographs are stored as mathematical code on our system, which means once we've developed these files we discard the iris image," Ms Watson said. "An image can never be rebuilt from a mathematical file." She said the iris recognition system from Argus Solutions would look for a matching file to enable entry into the auction house. With about 600 people attending the weekly auctions, registration time is expected to be cut from 40 seconds to 15 seconds a person, saving about 3 1/2 hours of registration each auction. Ms Watson said the system would manage fraud. "From time to time there is a small percentage of people at the auction that engage in inappropriate behaviour such as intimidating people or presenting cheques that bounce." The technology would also be useful in barring people from auctions, she said. "If we want to remove them, we can effectively just remove their picture from the system." Ms Watson said the technology was introduced at the auction centre yesterday. "We had no adverse reaction." The system may be introduced at other salvage centres in NSW and Victoria. Catching a fraudster's eye |
May 26, 2004
Place another billion candles on the cakeScott Lafee For decades, cosmologists have debated the age of the universe, lately settling on the figure of 13.7 billion years. This is a good thing – or at least a sensible-sounding thing – since earlier age estimates suggested the universe might be a mere 8 billion years old, making it paradoxically younger than its oldest stars. One way scientists estimate the age of the universe is by looking at the oldest detectable stars. A star's brilliance is a good indication of its age. Younger stars burn more brightly than older stars because they have greater mass and more fuel. A star like the sun has enough fuel in its core to burn at its current brightness for approximately 9 billion years. A star twice as massive will burn through its fuel supply in just 800 million years. A star half as massive might conserve enough fuel to survive 20 billion years. When astronomers measure the brightness of the farthest visible stars – those presumed to be closest to the birth of the universe – they get a rough age of the whole shebang. For scientific purposes, of course, greater detail is required, including a precise understanding of atomic reactions within the stars themselves. Enter some scientists working beneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. In a paper to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they say their underground experiments, shielded from surface radiation by 4,620 feet of rock, indicate the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle, which produces energy within big stars, is slower than generally believed. In other words, these scientists say, massive stars live longer and the universe, by their new estimate, is really 14.7 billion years old. When cosmologists aren't debating how old the universe is, they're arguing over its size, which has been a question for the ages, so to speak. Possible answers range from slightly bigger than what we can see to infinite. Last year, a New York mathematician speculated that the universe might be relatively small, a mere 60 billion light-years in diameter and shaped like a soccer ball. He based his estimate upon data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe (WMAP), a satellite sitting some 931,000 miles from Earth that measures minute temperature differences in the cosmic background microwave radiation lingering from the big bang. Sixty billion light-years sounds like a goodly distance. After all, a light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year, and light moves at a faster-than-anything-else clip of 186,282 miles per second. But lots of cosmologists think 60 billion light-years of space sounds a bit cramped. They are supported by new research, also coming out soon in Physical Review Letters, from a Montana State University physicist who analyzed his own chunk of WMAP data. Neil Cornish calculates that the universe cannot possibly be smaller than 78 billion light-years across and may eventually prove to be as much as 90 billion light-years wide. Cornish's much-larger universe theory essentially deflates the "soccer ball universe" theory because the latter posits that in a ball-shaped universe, light traveling throughout must eventually returns to where it began, arriving from multiple directions. "In principle, it would not be ridiculous to see light from the Earth that has wrapped around the universe, so we could see the Earth as it was when, say, life formed 4 billion years ago," Cornish told the journal Nature. In reality, there's no supporting evidence. Light from one object arriving from different directions would, in theory, create circular patterns of hot and cold spots in the radiation background. Cornish found no such statistically significant patterns. I simply observe that nobody has ever observed 4 billion-year-old life. Place another billion candles on the cake |
May 26, 2004
Brunei’s Explomats Target e-Learning Explosion At Quiz EventBandar Seri Begawan – Memory alone may not be the key to mathematics, Brunei’s ‘explomats’ were told yesterday. The subject could be better mastered through practice and strong discipline. Besides revising the subject in school, students could also further advance their mathematics skills during school activities. Dayang Masni binte Haji Munir, Head of External Affairs of the Brunei Shell Petroleum Sdn Bhd, underlined this while officiating the launching of the 12th Explomaths 2004 interschool quiz. Her speech was read by Awang Sukardi bin Suparjan, Acting Head of External Affairs. Dayang Masni said that in this globalisation era and the usage of high technology, the country needs an efficient human work force to exploit it. She added that students were part of the feedstock to the country’s human resource that will be driving force of future national development and progress. Besides that, she urged students to continue efforts in improving their achievements especially in public examinations of lower and upper secondary levels. She also called on students to use the opportunity provided by joining in beneficial programmes and thus they could upgrade their performance and self-confidence. The Explomaths 2004 was organised to promote the use of e-Learning among students in mathematics and to give them and their teachers wider opportunities to explore the wonders of mathematics leading to an explosion in learning. More than 30 primary and secondary schools nationwide participated in this year’s explomaths which carried the theme “e-Mathematics Explosion”. -- Courtesy of Radio Television Brunei Brunei’s Explomats Target e-Learning Explosion At Quiz Event |
May 25, 2004
When Even Mathematicians Don't Understand the MathBy SUSAN KRUGLINSKI To most of us, smudgy white mathematical scrawls covering a blackboard epitomize incomprehensibility. The odd symbols and scattered numerals look like a strange language, and yet to read them, neurologists tell us, we would have to use parts of our brains that have nothing to do with what we normally think of as reading and writing. Asked if there exist mathematical concepts that defy explanation to a popular audience, Dr. Stewart, author of "Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So" replied: "Oh, yes - possibly most of them. I have never even dared to try to explain noncommutative geometry or the cohomology of sheaves, even though both are at least as important as, say, chaos theory or fractals." Dr. Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University and author of "The Millennium Problems," which tries to describe the most challenging problems in mathematics today, admits defeat in his last and most impenetrable chapter, where he is forced to interpret something called the Hodge conjecture. He suggests to readers, "If you find the going too hard, then the wise strategy might be to give up." "What the book was really saying was, 'You're not going to understand what this problem is about as a layperson, but neither will the experts,' '' he said, adding, "The story is that mathematics has reached a stage of such abstraction that many of its frontier problems cannot be understood even by the experts." At the same time, higher math is used to decipher the existence and composition of the world. But how can it make sense that a nearly unintelligible language can explain the physical world? Dr. Devlin noted that the familiar model of the atom - a nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons - was long obsolete. "Yet physicists can successfully use that image of the solar system model with its rotating billiard balls," he said. "It's the same with string theory. I mean, give me a break - they're not little loops of string! For one thing, they're in 11 dimensions." In fact, it is difficult to explain what math is, let alone what it says. Math may be seen as the vigorous structure supporting the physical world or as a human idea in development. Some mathematicians say it is not in the same category as biology, astronomy or geology. While those fields have empirical systems of experimentation and discovery, some might say mathematicians rely on something more intuitive. And just as one cannot define what it is that makes a moving phrase played on a violin moving, the essence of the superb equation may also be ineffable. This makes for a frustrating human dilemma. Our brains have the ability to compute the abstract mathematics they created to construct theories about reality, and yet they may never be smart enough to comprehend those theories, let alone explain them. Despite his and his colleagues' tireless efforts, Dr. Greene concedes that this paradox ultimately makes sense. "Our brains evolved so that we could survive out there in the jungle," he said. "Why in the world should a brain develop for the purpose of being at all good at grasping the true underlying nature of reality?" When Even Mathematician Don't Understand the Math |
May 25, 2004
Viruses nip Russia after the Cold WarBy John Blau, IDG News Service For all its disadvantages, the former Soviet Union had one hugely overlooked advantage: it kept hackers, crackers and virus writers confined inside the country by restricting their access to the Internet. A decade later, Internet penetration is booming in the region, particularly in Russia, and viruses are epidemic. In fact, Russians are linked to some of the nastiest viruses the IT world has ever experienced: Bagel, MyDoom and NetSky, to name just a few. Security experts warn that the situation is likely to worsen as hacking, cracking and virus writing shift from being a mischievous hobby of young kids to a lucrative occupation of skilled professionals working hand-in-hand with hardened criminals. "There is more of a financial incentive now for hackers and crackers as well as for virus writers to write for money and not just for glory or some political motive," said one former hacker, known as 3APA3A, who is currently employed as a security expert. That view contrasts sharply with the situation several years ago when hacking had another status in Russia. In a message published on www.globalsecurity.org, one former hacker-turned-teacher wrote that during his childhood, he and a couple of friends hacked programs and distributed them for free. "It was like our donation to society," he wrote. "It was a form of honor; (we were) like Robin Hood bringing programs to people." Moscow even has a hacking school: http://hscool.net. The combination of over-educated and under-employed specialists has made Russia an ideal breeding ground for hackers. The hacker community was infused with professionals following a financial crash in 1998 that left many computer programmers and business people financially destroyed and out of work. Even today, the country continues to churn out plenty of students who excel at mathematics and physics, but who struggle to find work. Russian hackers have been behind some of the most audacious cybercrimes ever reported. Mathematician and computer specialist Vladimir Levin from St. Petersburg was nabbed in 1995 and sentenced to three years in a Florida prison in 1997 for hacking into Citibank Inc.'s computers and electronically transferring around $10 million out of the bank's accounts. To this day, no one knows exactly how he broke into the bank's system. Viruses nip Russia after the Cold War |
May 25, 2004
CM to lay foundation for Math school at KozhikodeTHIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Chief Minister A K Antony will lay the foundation stone of the Kerala School of Mathematics, set up by the Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Environment, at Kozhikode on May 30, in the premises of the Centre for Water Resources Development and Management. The School is being set up with the financial assistance from the Department of Atomic Energy. It will initially run doctoral and post-doctoral programmes, and will conduct several external workshops and training programmes for mathematicians in Kerala and the country, a CWRDM release said here. Conceived as a Centre of Excellence in Mathematics in Kerala, the institution is expected to intensify and nurture mathematical talents and provide structures in which mathematical research would flourish. The new organisation will make efforts to revive the mathematical tradition of Kerala and develop mathematical research of international level. During the medieval period (1300-1600 AD), there was a School of Mathematics in Malabar with its activities centred around Thrikandiyoor, Alathiyoor and nearby places. Some of the names associated with the history of mathematicians in Kerala are Madhava of Sangamagrama, Parameswara of Alathiyoor, Neelakantha Somayaji, Jyethadeva and Achyutha Pisharody. CM to lay foundation for Math school at Kozhikode |
May 24, 2004
CMU grad student develops origami-making robotBy Byron Spice Take a piece of paper ... fold here ... crease there ... turn inside out ... fold flap, repeat ... and voila! You've got a pirate's hat. Or a swan. Or a drinking cup. Origami, the Japanese art of folded-paper sculpture, can be just that simple. Or it can be intricate, involving numerous, exacting folds that yield objects as complex as a rose, an albatross or the double helix of a DNA molecule. But from the standpoint of a robot, nothing about paper folding is easy. Flexible, unstretchable paper is hard to handle with existing robotic tools and the three-dimensional objects crafted from an almost two-dimensional material are hard to mathematically represent in a robot's digital mind. "Origami is way out there ---- it's like a space shot," said Matthew Mason, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University whose research interests include the mechanics of manipulation. So when one of his graduate students, Devin Balkcom, decided to build an origami-making robot for his doctoral thesis, Mason wasn't enthusiastic. Such a robot was virtually unprecedented and chances were good that the whole enterprise would crash and burn, leaving Balkcom without any publishable results and without his degree. That was in January 2003. Today, Balkcom has a robot that can crank out paper airplanes and pointed hats, he's on schedule to earn his doctorate in August and his talk on robotic origami drew a standing-room-only crowd at a recent technical conference. "The robot itself is not the biggest part of the project," Balkcom said, noting it consists primarily of a small industrial robot arm and a work table akin to a sheet metal press. Rather, the bigger challenge was coordinating movement of the parts so that paper could be folded with some semblance of a crease and so that the paper's natural tendency to unfold did not foul up succeeding steps. And he needed to find a way to mathematically describe the origami structure itself. CMU grad student develops origami-making robot |
May 24, 2004
New hybrid science fields try to understand social patternsBy TOM SIEGFRIED Asimov's Foundation novels – the most famous science-fiction trilogy between Lord of the Rings and Star Wars – described a new science of social behavior called psychohistory. Mixing psychology with math, psychohistory hijacked the methods of physics to precisely predict the future course of human events. Today, Asimov's vision is no longer wholly fiction. His psychohistory exists in a loose confederation of research enterprises seeking equations that capture patterns in human behavior. These enterprises go by different names and treat different aspects of the issue. But they all share a goal of better understanding the present in order to foresee the future, and possibly help shape it. Almost daily, research papers in this genre appear in scientific journals or on the Internet. Some examine voting patterns in diverse populations, how crowds behave when fleeing in panic, or why societies rise and fall. Others describe ways to forecast trends in the stock market or the likely effect of antiterrorist actions. Still others analyze how rumors, fads or new technologies spread. Once the province of sociologists, political scientists, economists or philosophers, such issues are now routinely analyzed by physicists and mathematicians. Universities and institutions around the world have seized versions of Asimov's vision for new research themes. At the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a new behavioral sciences program focuses on economic behavior and cultural evolution. The National Science Foundation has identified "human and social dynamics" as a new funding priority area. At various schools, collaborators from diverse departments are creating new hybrid disciplines, with names like econophysics, socionomics, evolutionary economics, social cognitive neuroscience and experimental economic anthropology. Like Asimov's psychohistory, sociophysics is rooted in statistical mechanics, the math used by physicists to describe the big picture when lacking data about the details. Nobody can track the trillion trillion molecules of air floating around in a room, for instance, but statistical mechanics can tell you how an air conditioner will affect the overall temperature. In a similar way, science cannot describe how any given individual will behave. But put enough people together, Asimov's psychohistorian Hari Seldon reasoned, and laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns – just as the way molecules move and interact determines the temperature and pressure of a gas. Network math offers obvious social uses. It's just what the doctor ordered for tracking the spread of an infectious disease, for instance, or plotting vaccination strategies. And because ideas can spread like epidemics, similar math may govern the spread of opinions and social trends. Numerous versions of network- or other statistical-physics math have attempted to identify patterns of opinion flow. Serge Galam, of the French research institute CNRS, has studied the spread of terrorism, for instance, trying to identify what conditions drive the growth of terrorism networks. In other work, Dr. Galam has analyzed opinion transmission and voting behaviors, concluding that "hung election scenarios," like the 2000 U.S. presidential contest, "are predicted to become both inevitable and a common occurrence." "I think in some limited domains it might be pretty powerful," says Cornell University mathematician Steven Strogatz. "It really is the right language for discussing enormous systems of whatever it is, whether it's people or neurons or spins in a magnet. ... But I worry that a lot of these physicist-style models of social dynamics are based on a real dopey view of human psychology." New hybrid science fields try to understand social patterns |
May 24, 2004
Mathematical mysteries wantedThe first Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group conference hosted by the Centre for Mathematics in Industry was so successful the organisers are now putting the call out to industry for more problems to solve. After 20 years of being hosted successfully in Australia, the Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group (MISG) came to Auckland for the first time at the beginning of this year. It brought together nearly 140 mathematicians from all parts of the world to consider the conundrums of six industrial problems. Brain storming sessions were held to unravel the mathematical problems put forward by New Zealand Steel, NRM Foods and Tegel, Transpower NZ Ltd, Solid Energy Ltd, Environment Canterbury and Compac Sorting Equipment Ltd. The problems presented included earthquake damage in underground roadways, forecasting wind farm generation, the dispersion rates of wilding trees and the optimal sorting of product into fixed weight packaging. Organiser Professor Graeme Wake says they now want to hear from companies or industry organisations with problems that could have mathematical solutions that can’t be solved in-house. He says they will consider any industrial, environmental or business problem amenable to quantitative formulation and possible mathematical solution. “We know there are a lot of companies without access to sophisticated techniques in mathematical sciences. We can offer those services. The problems could be engineering or process-based, financial or biologically-based as the wilding tree problem was this year. “Mathematics is everywhere. Most things can be quantified in some way. If we can find the right framework, we can usually underpin decision support. Even health, medicine and legal processes can be quantified. The tricky bit is finding the right formulation for the problem in mathematical terms so it can be analysed.” Mathematical mysteries wanted |
May 24, 2004
Search to see if you are famousBy Nick Farrell: A GROUP OF physics and computer-science boffins have worked out a scientific way of telling if you are famous based on how often your name turns up on an internet search. According to NewsFactor, researchers at Clarkson University used Google to establish a precise mathematical definition of fame. In a new paper Clarkson researchers James Bagrow, Hernan Rozenfeld, Erik Bollt and Daniel ben-Avraham used the number of Google hits to study the relationship between fame and merit. Roychowdhury and Simkin used Google to look at World War I pilot "aces". They discovered that most famous aces were those with the greatest number of Google hits, while the most meritorious would be those who actually shot down the greatest number of enemy fighter planes. They also found that a scientific paper could become famous simply because lots of people cited it in their own work. A phenomenon which is also noted on Google. After a while the researchers started to wonder if fame depends on achievement at all. The boffins found definitive mathematical relationships between their new idea of scientific achievement and the level of fame a scientist had achieved. However when it came to famous people the winners were singers like Michael Jackson (5,570,000 Google hits) and Janet Jackson (3,190,000 hits). Only one scientist - Albert Einstein - breaks into the Google million-hit club (1,660,000), with Isaac Newton a close second (902,000 hits) and Galileo a distant third (245,000 hits). As a measure of IT fame, Bill Gates has 3,710,000 hits, Steve Jobs has 7,490,000, Intel's Andrew Grove 936,000 and Mike Mageek has 264,000 hits. Search to see if you are famous |
May 23, 2004
Tunes are music for the ears and soulBy Deborah Smith, Science Editor Some music makes us weep, some makes our spirits soar. It can lift us off our seats, or put us to sleep. Now a Sydney music psychologist, Emory Schubert, has developed a way to mathematically quantify the emotional impact of different compositions. "I have a fascination for how music works and I'm hoping this takes us a small step towards uncovering some of its magical, mystical properties," he said. Researchers have used many approaches to try to fathom the stirring of a listener's soul, including measuring their heart rate and observing them shift in their seats. Dr Schubert got 67 people to move a computer mouse across a screen continuously to indicate whether they felt the music was expressing happiness or sadness and arousal or sleepiness. He chose four pieces of classical romantic music - a very sad guitar concerto by Joaquin Rodrigo, a lively dance by Antonin Dvorak, a light-hearted polka by Johann Strauss jnr and Edvard Grieg's serene Morning. The responses, which lagged a couple of seconds behind shifts in the music, were matched to musical features such as loudness, tempo, shape of a melody or "brightness" of the sound. "What we've shown is that it is possible to quantify some of these emotions with some precision," Dr Schubert said. "Increasing happiness was associated with rising pitch in the Rodrigo and more instruments in the Grieg composition." Loudness also predicted arousal. While this might seem obvious, Dr Schubert said it was important to confirm connections, not just make assumptions. The experiment, which is to be published in the journal Music Perception, also revealed people reacted much more quickly to sudden increases in loudness. While many have argued that emotional responses to music are too subjective to be quantified, this sudden heightened arousal showed there could be universal reactions to some musical features that had emerged during human evolution, Dr Schubert said. Tunes are music for the ears and soul |
May 22, 2004
A Measure of BeautyMathematician George David Birkhoff (1884–1944) is best known for his work on differential equations and dynamics. His ergodic theorem gave the kinetic theory of gases a rigorous basis. He solved important problems in celestial mechanics and made contributions to the mathematical foundations of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Birkhoff also had a keen interest in aesthetics—the qualities that make a painting, sculpture, musical composition, or poem pleasing to the eye, ear, or mind. He sought a formula—a mathematical measure—that would capture an object's beauty. Birkhoff's interest in aesthetics began early. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was intrigued by the structure of western music and pondered the riddle of what makes something melodious. In the early 1930s, Birkhoff spent a year traveling around the world studying art, music, and poetry in various countries. He came up with a formula that encapsulated his insights into aesthetic value and described his theory in a 1933 book, Aesthetic Measure, published by Harvard University Press. At the core of his theory was a formula: M = O/C, where M is aesthetic measure or value, O is aesthetic order, and C is complexity. In other words, Birkhoff put a high aesthetic value on orderliness and a low one on complexity. In his view, beauty increases as complexity decreases. In any work of art, Birkhoff claimed, imaginary lines can be drawn across from point to point, following the principal lines of the composition. These lines define geometric areas that generally have a comprehensible form. Similarly, light and dark areas have a certain order or pattern. "There should be a natural primary center of interest in the painting and also suitable secondary centers," Birkhoff explained. "Such a primary center of interest is often taken in the central vertical line of the painting or at least near to it. The elements of order are of course taken to be the same as in the three-dimensional object represented. Finally there are the connotative elements which play a decisive part; a good painting requires a suitable subject just as much as a poem requires a poetical idea." Much of the Science News Letter article is about poetry. In Birkhoff's formula for poetry, O = aa + 2r + 2m – 2ae – 2ce, where aa stands for alliteration and assonance, r for rhyme, n for musical sounds, ae for alliterative excess, and ce for excess of consonant sounds. Birkhoff suggested that his formula has practical value. "The architect need no longer depend upon using forms and designs that have proved their artistic acceptability through generations of aesthetic judgments," Marjorie Van de Water wrote in Science News Letter. "He can test his creations against an objective formula as well as against his own 'feeling.' The designer, the potter, the commercial creator of anything dependent upon its aesthetic qualities for its success can likewise find assistance in this research." Birkhoff himself conceded that an intuitive appreciation is better than any attempt to analyze the source of one's delight in a beautiful object. Nevertheless, he argued, that pleasure is due to an unconscious appreciation of the mathematical proportions of the object. A Measure of Beauty |
May22, 2004
Fragments of the universeWe tend to see ourselves as more sophisticated than our great-grandparents. Many of the assumptions of the world a century ago have been so overturned that you would think the paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, produced between 1907 and the first world war, would make perfect sense today, and even appear a little naive. Yet their difficulty is not of a type that recedes with familiarity. Cubism is like a maths exam at the gateway to modern art. The paintings are uniquely unyielding. Art today is made from the building blocks of ordinary life. Cubism took these building blocks, or working premises, apart. Most art confirms our sense of who we are and how we live. Cubism suggests that our real existence eludes the images and stories we constantly make of it. "I went to the cafe" - cubism asks what a cafe is, what it is to go, and, most provocatively of all, who the hell you are. It is philosophical. This is why it remains undomesticated, while all other avant gardes can be turned into decoration or romance. Most modern painting is stylish. It uses geometrical forms rhetorically. In revolutionary Russia, black squares and suprematist constellations of bars and pyramids became a shorthand for a new society. In Mussolini's Italy, futurist images of bodies hurtling through space became icons of militarism. Today, such modern geometries are as likely to be found on an album cover as in an art gallery. Cubism was never a style in that sense. It was an inquiry. Picasso and Braque were lucky enough to be young - Picasso was 28 in 1909, Braque 27 - at a time of intellectual revolution. Habits of perception and assumptions about the nature of things that had been stable since the 17th century were falling away. Arthur I Miller's 2001 book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc demonstrates how uncannily Picasso's discovery of cubism parallelled Einstein's contemporary theories of special and general relativity. In science, mathematics and philosophy, the laws of a clockwork universe established by Sir Isaac Newton in the Baroque age were giving way before the first world war to extraordinary notions - that time and space are one, that light waves curve, that no two observers ever see exactly the same thing. Picasso and Einstein, Miller has shown, were both influenced by the French thinker Henri Poincaré, who published his book La Science et l'Hypothèse in 1902. In it he argued that, far from being universally or absolutely true, the Euclidean geometry that had defined mathematics since ancient times was only one of many possible systems, its three dimensions nothing like the only ones that could be conceived. But, said Poincaré, Euclid's is the most "convenient" set of assumptions with which to negotiate life. Thinking in three dimensions is practical, it seems to match our experience and speculation about a fourth does not help you to bake a baguette. Einstein, speculating on the basic premises of physics while working in the patents office in Bern, found Poincaré's relativism liberating. Picasso learned about his ideas through the mathematician Maurice Princet, who was a regular at Montmartre cafe tables. Picasso's friend André Salmon wrote that Princet "preoccupies himself especially with painters who disdain ancient perspective. He praises them for no longer trusting the illusory optics of not long ago... " We can't go around every day acknowledging that space and time are a continuum. We know clock time is a convention but that is no help when you're late for a meeting. In the same way, the insights of cubist painting are useless. It doesn't help to know that the form you call a bottle is really a little universe of hardness, transparency, tubular geometry, containing taste, memory, and all the other things a cubist painter finds in a bottle on a cafe table. Cubism is as spiritual as it is scientific. To live the cubist way would mean to be alive to the texture, weight and fragmentary beauty of the world. It would take for ever to appreciate a bowl of fruit. Fragments of the universe |
May 21, 2004
BBC World Television Features Kgb Software as the Future of Search TechnologyLondon, UK (ots) – BBC World Television has recently broadcast “Click Search“, a documentary about the future of search technology – and identifies InfoTame as the most advanced software of its kind. InfoTame is the world’s first artificial intelligence software which can rapidly analyze billions of text documents and extract information based on its significance (rather than “frequency“ of key words). The software can understand and find significant concepts and ideas in large volumes of information, and then summarize, categorize and correlate hidden patterns, in seconds. Astonishingly, the software does not require the input of keywords – and so allows users to search for “unknown unknowns“. “Anyone who has used today’s search engines knows how stupid they are“, said Paul Cheng, Managing Director of InfoTame’s UK office. “They always seem to return a flood of irrelevant results, and do not provide any meaningful or readily usable analysis of what those results mean. InfoTame’s powerful analytics engine solves this problem by reading all the documents in a specified database, and extracting the most significant words, ideas, concepts, and relationships – all of which are automatically summarized onto a single page.” InfoTame then provides the user with a natural navigation tool, an easy point-and-click interface, with which to drill down into thousands or millions of pages. InfoTame’s software has been battle-tested by the KGB for many years on extremely large databases scalable to many terabytes – in multiple human languages. The software’s underlying technology remains a closely guarded secret, but uses mathematical techniques derived from high-energy particle physics. BBC World Television Features Kgb Software as the Future of Search Technology |
May 21, 2004
Money won't change itBy DORETTA WILSON Toronto -- Re McGuinty Goes Out On An Education Limb (May 20): Merely throwing money at the problem without essentially changing how education is delivered is unlikely to improve results. We have been down that road before. The research is very clear that high spending is not necessarily associated with high achievement. Unchanged classroom practices, only with slightly smaller classes and more money, will not lead to the lofty improvement goals set by the province. The proposed new Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat needs to encourage teachers to use proven, effective reading and mathematics programs and teaching methods based on sound education research. A dramatic shift in pedagogical practice to more systematic, direct instruction, especially for at-risk students, is necessary. It fundamentally comes down to what you teach and how you teach it. As long as educators have no incentive to get better results, they will not be motivated to upgrade their teaching methods. Money won't change it |
May 21, 2004
Transhumanism takes technology to the level of faithBy MARGIE WYLIE Humanity is on its way out. Post-humanity - technologically enhanced and perhaps even immortal - is coming. The stuff of science fiction? No, it's creed to transhumanists, a diverse group of technological optimists who advocate the transformation of homo sapiens into a new species, one "better than human." Transhumanists see our era of rapid technological advance as the transitional phase between our human past and post-human future. Cochlear implants, artificial joints, genetic engineering, mood-altering and memory-enhancing drugs - all are preludes to an era when people will routinely enhance their brains, improve their bodies and perhaps live forever. Critics, however, think this could be the worst calamity to befall us, both as individuals and as a species. Transhumanists come in a wide variety, said James J. Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association based in Willington, Conn. Some are interested in life extension. Some want to be immortal. Some think nanotechnology - the emerging science of molecular machines - will someday repair our bodies from the inside out. Others are convinced they'll someday extend their memories with computer implants or upload their consciousness into a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. What all share is the desire "to ethically use technology to become more than human," said Hughes, whose organization has 3,000 members in 24 chapters across 98 countries. If transhumanism has a poster child, it's Steve Mann. A professor at the University of Toronto, Mann is arguably a cyborg - a bionic human. For more than 20 years, he has invented and worn electronic equipment through which he experiences the world. Strolling the street, Mann can browse the Web or monitor his heart rate, pulse and brain waves through sensors implanted in his body. He can simultaneously videotape everything he sees. Glasses correct his vision electronically - the prescription can be changed through software - and help his memory by giving people virtual name tags. Mann next hopes to implant the entire system, to give people a full-time "visual memory prosthesis," he said. Some transhumanists don't see what's so special about being human. Marvin Minsky, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, calls humans "meat machines" possessed of limited, frail minds and mortal bodies. Like other leading computer scientists, Minsky celebrates a future when humans will be able to "upload" the contents of their brains into computers or robot brains. Ray , inventor of the first computer systems that could read aloud to the blind, is a prominent transhumanist thinker. He has long predicted the merging of humans and computers, and recently called for replacing the body's often imperfect molecular blueprint, DNA, with software, which unlike DNA wouldn't suffer mutations. Transhumanism takes technology to the level of faith |
May 21, 2004
Golestan Palace Holds Painting Exhibition of Mirza Mahmud SabaTEHRAN May 21 (MNA) –- An exhibition of paintings by Mirza Mahmud Khan-e Saba is currently underw skilled master of calligraphy, painting and sculpture where his art in painting opened a new stage in Iranian painting. He had a new style of work. He used to omit all the points of European style of works, which seemed unnecessary in his own method and replaced new things he liked and created himself. His watercolor tableau of Shams al-Emareh Mansion is considered one of his masterpieces. He had a delicate taste in drawing royal mansions, and used to draw the geometrical designs in their outmost accuracy. The exhibition is open every day but Sundays and Thursdays at Khorshid Kolah Mansion in Golestan Palace at Panzdah-e Khordad (Ark) Square. Golestan Palace Holds Painting Exhibition of Mirza Mahmud Saba |
May 20, 2004
The Myth of the ModelBy Gene Callahan We live in an age where abstract models of the real world are held in high regard. Wall Street firms hire mathematicians and physicists to create sophisticated mathematical models of various assets and markets. Meteorologists employ computer models to predict the path of storms. Marketing firms model the anticipated consumer response to a proposed ad campaign. Bridges are built, planes are flown, giant buildings are raised, and crops are planted with the aid of abstract systems of equations. Military strategists use models to simulate the course of battles and wars under various scenarios; indeed, the Iraq War was war-gamed long before the fighting began. Correctly interpreting the relationship between a model and the complete experiences from which it was abstracted is a matter of skilled judgment. A model cannot interpret itself; it asserts that, if certain aspects of a particular situation closely conform to specifications contained in the model, then we can expect certain other circumstances to arise, either with full certainty or with some measure of probability. It cannot mechanically spit out an answer as to how well it applies to some real event; that determination requires skilled, experienced judgment. We have arrived at a crucial fact about the application and misapplication of models: That someone is highly skilled at developing and manipulating the abstractions that make up a model does not necessarily mean that he is also adept at interpreting how that model relates to reality. A person who is extremely good at creating models of financial instruments may be awful at trading securities based on his models, which is why investment banks employ traders to use the software created by the modelers. Skill at simulating battle scenarios does not equate to the ability to adjust one's strategy to the ever-evolving conditions on the field, which is why modern armies have battle-experienced officers in charge of thetant mathematical number e, and is well worth reading if you have an interest in such things. (e, which is approximately equal to 2.718281828, is the base of natural logarithms, and has many other notable properties, such as the fact that y = ex is the only function that is its own derivative.) But the book contains several examples of mistaking a model for reality. For example, Maor (p. 103) notes that the rate at which a radioactive substance decays is modeled by the equation m = m0e-at —the mass remaining at time t is equal to the initial mass, m0, times the number e raised to the negative power a times t. In the equation, although e-at becomes smaller and smaller as time passes, it never reaches zero. Therefore, Maor concludes, "the substance will never completely disintegrate." It is true that if we start with a couple of million plutonium atoms, the above model of radioactive decay implies that, even after a billion years, there will still be some plutonium left, roughly on the order of a millionth of an atom. But the idea of a millionth of an atom of plutonium is nonsensical—plutonium means a whole atom with a certain number of protons, so we either have at least one atom of plutonium or we don't have any plutonium at all. At some point, whatever result the equation describing radioactive decay comes up with, the very last atom of some initial pile of a radioactive substance will decay, leaving exactly none of m0 behind. In other words, it eventually will "completely disintegrate." But let us return to our main topic, and look at a scientific study that has garnered a great deal of public attention, due to the fact that it supposedly shows a widely observed phenomenon is merely an illusion. Famed psychologist Amos Tversky and two of his colleagues performed a study (Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky, 1985) in which they claimed to demonstrate that the popular notion of a basketball player having the "hot hand," meaning that he is shooting particularly well for a time, is a delusion springing from ignorance of statistics. The authors examined extensive sequences of shots by players on the Philadelphia 76ers, looking for evidence of hot streaks. The Boston Globe described their argument as follows: "The spectacle that basketball fans profess to see, Tversky argued, is nothing more than the standard laws of chance, observed through the imperfect lens of human cognition. Specifically, he noted, people have a tendency to expect the overall odds of a chance process (say, the 50 percent distribution of heads on a flipped coin, or the 46 percent accuracy of [76er-guard] Toney's field-goal shooting) to apply to each and every segment of the process. For instance, when flipping a coin 20 times, it's not uncommon to see a string of four heads in a row. Yet when people are paying attention to a shorter sequence of the 20 coin flips, they are inclined to regard a string of four heads as nonrandom—as a hot streak—even though a strict back-and-forth of heads and tails throughout the 20 flips would be far less likely." (Ryerson, 2002) As I see it, the crucial fact that Tversky and his colleagues overlooked in their analysis is that whether or not a basketball player makes any particular shot is not a random event. If he executes perfectly, then the ball will go in the basket. If you have played much basketball, then you know that you can often detect a flaw in your technique even as the ball leaves your hand, realizing that your shot won't go in well before it nears the hoop. That alone does not demonstrate that making shots is not a chance phenomenon—after all, you might be able to detect your errors but still have no control over them. However, the fact is that you can correct the problem on your next shot by focusing on the proper execution of the movement you botched previously. And increased focus is the primary experience reported by players during the time when they had the "hot hand." So the misuse of abstract models is hardly unique to economics. The success of a model, along with the certainty of result it offers, can tempt its users to conflate it with reality. But the world is never ensnared in even the best of our nets. As Shakespeare said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The Myth of the Model |
May 19, 2004
Oh my, memorizing so many digits of piby Yicong Liu Three, he begins, fading into a trance, eyes squinting in intense concentration as he chants in a heavy, steady rhythm. Three point one four one five. He stands in front of an awestruck audience in room 365 while the numbers roll off his tongue effortlessly and quickly, nine two six five three five eight. They build into a steady, continuous stream, nine seven nine three two three… In less than five minutes, he has recited the first 800 digits of pi from memory. On March 17 sophomore Ryan Ly made his first official successful recitation of the digits of this irrational number in front of his classmates and teachers. For the last few years, Ly has developed a unique hobby in memorizing pi, and now is not only the champion at Blair, but would also rank eighth nationally and 27th internationally once he submits his recitation for official records. Eight hundred digits can be difficult to swallow, but pi is more easily digested in slices, a technique known as chunking, or grouping numbers to facilitate memorization, according to AP Psychology teacher Julia Smrek. Ly says he follows this process as well, pointing to the blocks dividing up the digits on his sheet. He looks for palindromes, repeated numbers, sequences that rhyme or any other patterns that suit him. To commit the numbers into long term memory, Ly recites pi to himself for several nights in place of counting sheep. Despite having memorized 800 digits of pi, Ly is still far from the current world record of 42,195 digits held by Hiroyuki Goto of Japan since 1995. For next pi day, March 14, 2005, Ly has still more plans for expanding his pi-digits. He points to his printed copy of pi and to the solid line, an indication of his goal for next year: the 1000th digit. Oh my, memorizing so many digits of pi |
May 19, 2004
Iranian Astronomer to Be CommemoratedTEHRAN, May 19 (MNA) -- Great Iranian astronomer and mathematician Mirza Abd al-Ghaffar Khan Najm al-Malek will be commemorated on May 23, concurrent with Cultural Heritage Week in Shahr-e Ray, Tehran province. Sponsored by the Tehran Cultural Heritage Department, the ceremony will be held on Sunday evening in the Cheshmeh-Ali region of Shahr-e Ray. According to the Public Relation Department of Tehran Cultural Heritage Department, Mirza Abd al-Ghaffar Khan Najm al-Dowleh known as “Najm al-Malek” was born in 1255 A.H. (1839) in Isfahan. Najm al-Malek, son of Mullah Ali-Mohammad Esfahani, was among the great personages of Qajar King Nasser ad-Din Shah Era (1848-1896). Educated at Dar al-Fonun school, the renowned Iranian astronomer and mathematician, also taught there as a mathematics professor. He wrote several books on mathematics, astronomy, and geometry. “Kefayat al-Hessab”, “Principles of Geometry”, “Bedayat al-Jabr”, and “Vassit al-Hessab”, as well as “Bedayat al-Hessab” are among his works. He died in 1326 A.H. (1910) at the age of 71 and was buried in the Safa’yyeh region (Cheshmeh-Ali) of Shahr-e Ray. It should be noted that Najm al-Malek’s mausoleum was refurbished in 2003 by the Tehran Cultural Heritage Department. Iranian Astronomer to Be Commemorated |
May 18, 2004
Thomas Zacharia Leads America’s Fastest Supercomputer Projectby: Francis C. Assisi Boston, 18 May -- America has set out to build the world’s fastest supercomputer, with Dr. Thomas Zacharia, a Kerala-born Indian American, at the helm. Zacharia is Associate Laboratory Director for High Performance Computing, and Director, Computer Science and Mathematics Division, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In this capacity, he leads the Laboratory´s agenda in Terascale Computing and Simulation Science in support of DOE´s missions in advancing science, national security, energy security and sustainable development. "The supercomputer will boost scientific computation to a scale that challenges the threshold of human comprehension," said Zacharia. "The expansion of computational power will usher in a new era of scientific discovery and help restore American leadership in climate modeling, biology, fusion energy and other fields." According to Zacharia, this scale-up in computing capabilities is hugely important for the U.S. science enterprise, with a near-term need for 50 to 100 teraflops of computing power. Currently Japan holds the fastest-supercomputer title with its Earth Simulator, which has 40-teraflop capability. The push to craft a faster supercomputer is not simply rooted in a desire to find out how much computing power can be created, Zacharia said. Rather, speedier technology will aid in science and technology to such a degree that it will actually change how science is done. "It´s not just a big computer that will come out of this," he said. "It´s the creation of a new national scientific fabric." He noted that there are already fundamental changes in how sciences like nanotechnology and biotechnology are approached because of computing power. With even more supercomputing speed, Zacharia predicted, there will be breakthrough discoveries in climate forecasting, biology and fusion energy, among other fields. "We will be able to investigate matter in a new way," he said. "It will allow us to understand the world we live in on a fundamental level." Zacharia predicts: “Within the next five years, computers 1000 times faster than those available to the scientific community today will be operating. These dramatic boosts in supercomputing power must be matched by corresponding increases in the capabilities of scientific modeling and simulation codes. Researchers across the Laboratory have teamed together to carry out the rigorous interdisciplinary effort of designing, building, tuning, integrating, and using codes to accelerate our solutions of complex scientific problems.” “As we build state-of-the-art computing facilities, bring new computers on line, and support exciting new science, we are creating a leading scientific enterprise that will help advance the revolution in science.” As example Zacharia predicts, "Biology is undergoing a major transformation that will be enabled and ultimately driven by computation." Thomas Zacharia Leads America’s Fastest Supercomputer Project |
May 18, 2004
200 Year Old Math Problem SolvedAfter 201 years, a retired Turkish mathematics teacher solved a math problem brought forward by the Italian mathematician, Malfatti, in 1803. The Turkey Institution of Scientific and Technical Researches (TUBITAK) endorsed the solution to the problem developed over seven years by Mustafa Tongemen. TUBITAK's endorsement said: 'We think that mathematician teacher, Mustafa Tongemen, has mainly solved Malfatti's problem. Malfatti's problem aims to extract three circular vertical cylinders from a triangular vertical prism made of marble, with the least material loss. Mustafa Tongemen worked on the problem two hours a day for seven years.. Last month, he reached a certain solution by finding the 10th circle in the triangle. Tongemen wants to have the solution published by an international scientific magazine. Although he has no material expectations, the retired mathematics teacher said, "I want my name to be marked in history." 200 Year Old Math Problem Solved |
May 18, 2004
Fin Garden, Lasting Memory in the Heart of the DesertTEHRAN, May 18 (MNA) –- The vibrant green trees heading to the blue sky, the dance of the breeze in the branches and a combination of burbling streams and song birds, make a collection in which the melody of life is sweetly tuned. All this beauty lies in Fin Garden of Kashan in the heart of the desert, which owes its fame to the bathhouse it holds in its heart, where Amir Kabir, the great chancellor of Naser ad-din Shah was killed. The delicate architecture in this garden proves that Kashan owns original civilization, art, and culture, the eyes approve upon seeing. The garden is not only a place full of lively green nature in the desert, it is a part of the amazing history of Iran, sealing the fate of the country’s precious creative men. The water dripping from the jar-shaped fountains along the streams in the middle of the garden, decorated with azure tile-work are one of the amazing parts of the garden, the beautiful masterpiece created by Iranian mathematician Ghiyas ad-din Jamshid Kashani. The structure of the building dates back to the Buyid later to be expanded and developed in the Safavid, Zand and Qajar eras. The garden includes a huge gate, a big structure in the middle of the garden, a bathhouse, the king’s room, museums, a pool, a library and several fountains. The murder of Amir Kabir in the bathhouse of Fin in 1889 added more to its fame. The garden was registered as a national monument in 1935, becoming a tourism magnet in recent years. Fin Garden, Lasting Memory in the Heart of the Desert |
May 17, 2004
Khayyam, Father of Rubaiyat in Persian LiteratureOmar Khayyam's (circa 1050-1122), full name was Ghiyath ad-Din Abul-Fat’h Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Neyshaburi al-Khayyami. A literal translation of the name al-Khayyami (or al-Khayyam) means 'tent maker' and this may have been the trade of Ibrahim his father. Khayyam played on the meaning of his own name when he wrote: Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science, Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned, The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life, And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing! Khayyam studied philosophy at Neyshabur. He was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer and, despite the difficulties which he described in this quote, he did write several works including Problems of Arithmetic, a book on music and one on algebra before he was 25 years old. In 1070, he moved to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, which is one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. There Khayyam was supported by Abu Tahir, a prominent jurist of Samarkand, and this allowed him to write his most famous algebra work, Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra. He is, however, most famous as the author of the Rubáiyát. About 1000 of these epigrammatic four-line stanzas, which reflect upon nature and humanity, are ascribed to him. The English poet and translator Edward Fitzgerald was the first to introduce Omar to the West through a version (1859) of 100 of the quatrains. This version is a paraphrase, often very close, that despite its flowery rhymed verse captures the spirit of the original. Of all the verses, the best known is the following: The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. Khayyam, Father of Rubaiyat in Persian Literature |
May 17, 2004
Geometry in arts: Teachers at sea, say teach us firstShradhha Sharma From teaching them to draw birds, bees, posters, banners and still life designing, they will now have to teach sketching of circles, heptagons, hexagons and other complex geometrical figures. But there’s a hiccup. These drawing teachers have no clue about geometry and need to be taught first. The UT Education Department’s decision to keep 30 marks for geometry in the 100 marks drawing paper from this academic session has sent drawing teachers in government schools in a tizzy. Most are not aware of the change. ‘‘I don’t know that we have to teach any such thing. We are not even qualified to do so,’’ says Amrit Kaur, a drawing teacher at Government High School, Sector 32. The change also has teachers up in arms. ‘‘On the one hand, the department is scrapping drawing books in some classes to encourage creative faculties of the students and on the other hand, it is making these hair-brained changes, especially when the students are already studying all this in their Maths class,’’ said one. Geometry in arts: Teachers at sea, say teach us first |
May 16, 2004
Have your Google people talk to my 'googol' peopleBy Gerald P. Merrell In the late 1930s, noted mathematician and Columbia University professor Edward Kasner was asked to come up with a name for an extraordinarily large number. While on a walk one day, he asked his 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, if he had any ideas. "Googol," the youngster replied. The concept was announced in 1940, in Kasner's best-selling book, Mathematics and the Imagination. A googol, he wrote, is 10 raised to the 100th power - or the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. In an obituary in The New York Times in 1955, Kasner was quoted explaining that a googol was "more than the number of raindrops falling on the city in a century, or the number of grains of sand on the Coney Island beach." Today, though, when most people hear the term, they are likely thinking not of Kasner, but of the popular Internet search engine, Google. And that, for some, is the problem. Relatives of Kasner are crying foul. They believe Google has gained financially at their expense. That conviction only increased with Google's recent announcement that it will go public, hoping to raise $2.7 billion in sales of its stock. If the stock price reaches $40 per share, the founders of the company and several of its employees will be worth many millions each. Have your Google people talk to my 'googol' people |
May 16, 2004
Conference Honors Math/Physics PioneerSome of the world's top mathematicians and theoretical physicists gather on campus this weekend for a conference in honor of one of the pioneers of the field, Professor Albert Schwarz of the UC Davis mathematics department. For 50 years, Schwarz has explored the extraordinary territory where theoretical physics and pure mathematics meet and blend. "Physics is a very rich source of mathematical problems, and solutions to these problems are useful for physicists and for pure mathematics also," Schwarz said. Schwarz has made a series of discoveries that solved physics problems while opening up new areas of mathematics, said Motohico Mulase, professor of mathematics at UC Davis and chair of the organizing committee. For most of the 20th century, physicists developing a new theory would generally find that mathematicians had already created tools to study it, he said. In 1960, physicist Eugene Wigener called this the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." "The key contribution of Albert Schwarz is to reverse this relationship between mathematics and physics. He showed the world how useful physics is in geometry and topology as a tool of discovering new ideas and results," Mulase said. Speakers at the conference, which began Thursday and runs through Sunday, May 16, include prominent mathematicians and theoretical physicists and five winners of the Fields Medal, considered the "Nobel Prize" of mathematics. They are Alain Connes, College de France, Paris; Vaughan Jones, UC Berkeley; Maxim Kontsevich, Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifique, France; Sergey Novikov, University of Maryland; and Edward Witten, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton. Schwarz's work has covered a wide range of topics at the intersection of mathematics and theoretical physics. His contributions have mostly been based on applying mathematical tools such as topology, noncommutative geometry and homological algebra to quantum field theory, string theory and M-theory -- areas which, he said with some understatement, are difficult to explain easily. Schwarz's recent work has been on string theory and M-theory. Once described as "a piece of 21st century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century," string theory holds that elementary particles are made up of loops of vibrating "string." Fundamental particles such as electrons, photons, quarks and neutrinos arise from different vibrations of the same type of string. At one time, physicists hoped that string theory could be the unifying "theory of everything" tying together forces from the subatomic to the cosmic. It's since become clear that string theory needs to be modified, leading to M-theory, Schwarz said. More recently, the idea that strings are fundamental objects of the universe has disappeared, and researchers think that there may be other fundamental objects or that strings are themselves made of something else. Conference Honors Math/Physics Pioneer |
May 15, 2004
Mental arithmetic and abacus plan for pupilsFrom the Chinese Press MAJOR Chinese dailies focused on the Government's plan to introduce the study of abacus and mental arithmetic as part of the Mathematics subject in Year One syllabus in all schools next year. Deputy Education Minister Datuk Hon Choon Kim said two periods a week would be allocated for the teaching of the two topics from Years One to Four and the objective was to strengthen the pupils' skill in doing mental calculation. He added that pupils would not be tested on the two topics during school examinations. Hon said while national schools would teach the new topics in English, the Chinese schools would have a choice to deliver the classes in either Mandarin or English. He said a trial run would start inJuly in selected schools. China Press quoted Hon as saying that experts from China had been hired to act as advisers in the implementation of teaching abacus and mental arithmetic. Mental arithmetic and abacus plan for pupils |
May 15, 2004
Who wrote the first program for computers and how did they do it?Alex Clarke Traditionally, the first computer program is credited to the Countess Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of Lord Byron, the poet. She worked closely with Sir Charles Babbage, the British inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines, which were mechanical calculating machines. Lovelace wrote a plan for how the Bernoulli numbers might be calculated, which is widely regarded as the first computer program. However, as Babbage's Engines were never completed, she worked without the benefit of an actual computer to test her ideas.The first true computer program is ascribed to British mathematician Alan Turing, the brilliant theorist who laid the foundations of modern computing in the 1930s. In the 1940s Turing devised a programming language for the Automatic Computing Engine, a successor to the Enigma-cracking Bletchley Park machines. Who wrote the first program for computers and how did they do it? |
May 14, 2004
The Dying of Western CultureLev Navrozov In the 1920s Oswald Spengler, a mathematician by education, a musician by vocation, and the last of the great German philosophers, became world-famous after publishing his book, the title of which was translated into English as “The Decline of the West,” but should have been translated more adequately as “The Dying of Western Culture.” Spengler invoked the great composers of the 18th and 19th centuries: the Italian Scarlatti, who created “the true sonata form,” the Germans Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, the Hungarian Liszt. . . . “Where are such great composers in the 20th century?” was the inevitable question. American university professors of music have been answering that in contrast to Scarlatti, Schoenberg, a contemporary of Spengler, created not merely a new “sonata form,” but invented a new music, called “atonal.” I use the word “invented” deliberately. In general, it began to be said at the beginning of the 20th century in Europe and in Russia that music, art, culture should be not created, but invented as a safety razor is invented by an engineer. Yet there was one difficulty. I have been listening for about 30 years to “the classical station of the New York Times.” The very phrase “classical music” was impossible in this sense in the 18th or 19th century in Europe and in Russia. Imagine Beethoven’s concert announced as a concert of classical music. There was no “classical music” as the opposite of “pop music,” the word “pop” having appeared in English in this sense only in 1880. There was music. Period. True, Beethoven wrote a piece for a child, Elisa. But it was as much music as his “Eroica.” The New York Times station broadcasts “classical music.” A tiny minority of Americans listen to “classical music,” and the rest to “pop music.” When by accident I turn the knob of my radio set just a hair’s breadth right or left, I plunge into the quagmire of hundreds or thousands of “pop” radio stations, screaming, banging, thumping, and roaring like primitive tribes or like Neanderthals of the Stone Age. The bulk of programming of the classical station of the New York Times has consisted in these 30 years mostly of composers that Spengler invoked as great about a century ago. The station thus endorses Spengler’s view about the dying of Western music since the early 20th century. As for Schoenberg, I called the station and asked the programming director why they have not broadcast a single piece of Schoenberg’s “new music” rather than a couple of his early compositions, which was still “the old music,” emulating Brahms, for example. “Sir,” answered the director of programming, “We are a commercial station, and when we began broadcasting Schoenberg’s new music, all listeners switched their radio sets off our station. We cannot afford it.” Thank God, they are commercial. If they subsisted on grants they could play Schoenberg’s new music that only university professors of music would listen to because they receive university salaries for teaching and writing books about how great Schle, to make safety razors shave more safely and/or better. “Modern art” (striving to be “classical,” and not “pop”) consists more and more of inventions and innovations of art”: a square canvas painted all black (“The Black Square”) and a square canvas painted all white (“The White Square”). “The Black Square” was thrown in Russia after 1922 as garbage (by Malevich himself), but “The White Square” is treasured in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as the first work of modern “graphic arts,” which later filled all art shows, galleries, and museums of the West. Ironically, Malevich himself decided after 1922 that his “Squares” were garbage and he should become a “Soviet painter” in the spirit of “socialist realism.” But since he had no ability in painting, he “did not make it,” and hence died in 1935 in poverty and total obscurity, which has been represented in the West as the tragic end of an artist of genius, “the founder of modern art,” hunted down by the ignorant mediocrities to death. Actually, everything “invented” in the West in art in the 20th century on the inspiration of “The White Square” belongs where Malevich threw out “The Black Square” as garbage. When Johann Sebastian Bach composed and played his music, there was, outside the church, folk music which was no less valuable than what Bach composed, but there was no “pop” music, that is, screaming, banging, thumping, and roaring, heard outside the classical station of the New York Times. Those unable to compose and play music like Bach or create folk music, were to listen, and not to scream, bang, thump, and roar by way of their own (or “pop”) music. In the 20th century this silence began to seem counter to “freedom and democracy.” Why are the many obliged to listen to the few and have no human right to make what THEY regard as music? Let us scream, bang, thump, and roar! We are many, they are few! Where is freedom and democracy? “Pop culture” has become the culture of “the vast majority of Americans” and threatens to swallow the music of the classical station of the New York Times because “pop music” requires no education, no spiritual effort, no understanding, while “classical music” was at first incomprehensible to me, for example. Yes, I was in mid-teenage when I bought at a Moscow flea market two gramophone records. I played them -— and heard nothing except a meaningless noise. The matter might have ended then and there, and for the rest of my life I would be listening to “pop music.” But I was a son of a writer (he had been killed in the war), and I remembered that his brilliant friends listened to that incomprehensible music and despised “pop culture.” So I did not conclude that this music was incomprehensible gibberish -— I concluded that I was defective, unworthy of my father and his friends, an ignoramuse the words of a foreign tongue you know as to the language born. My survey of culture would be incomplete without a glimpse into literature. Let us ignore “pop” (or pulp) novels, along with “pop movies.” In the late 1970s and the early 1980s I reviewed for “The Chronicles of Culture,” “The Yale Literary Magazine,” and “St. John’s Review” such novels as the New York Times and the Washington Post approved as “classical,” that is, of the same value as the great literature of old. Here is just one case. Published and staged in 1939 was Irwin Shaw’s “The Gentle People,” which was still “classical literature,” that is, literature. But for my review I received Irwin Shaw’s “The Top of the Hill,” published in 1979, forty years later. I could not believe that the two books had been written by the same person. The Irwin Shaw of 1939 did not imitate Ibsen or Gorky or Chekhov -— he was an AMERICAN writer of genius. The Irwin Shaw of 1979 is not a writer: he is one of millions of amateurs who clutter publishing houses in all countries with their witless, smug, and stupid hackwork. “The Top of the Hill” is below the worst Soviet propaganda hackwork in Stalin’s Russia. No doubt that such an amazing degradation of literature as evinced by the same person cannot but affect the general mental level, including perhaps even the level of science and technology. Einstein had developed the theory of relativity by 1905, but he was rooted in the “classical” culture, was a musician (like Spengler), and said that the writer Dostoyevsky “gave me more than anyone else, more than Gauss.” In response to my review, Irwin Shaw called the editor of “The Chronicles of Culture” and made a row. He knew that what I said was true and publicly unanswerable. The publisher of Updike similarly attacked the editor of “St. John’s Review.” Finally, “The Chronicles of Culture,” “St. John’s Review,” and “The Yale Literary Magazine” were taken away from their editors who published my reviews. Our goal was to stop and perhaps reverse the regression of culture. But, of course, the best way to ensure further culture degradation is to take away the magazines from all editors who let their reviewers criticize the current state of Western culture. The Dying of Western Culture |
May 14, 2004
Technology, art combine in new Visalia exhibitBy Helen Stanton Alchemy, a magical process for changing one thing into another, is the perfect title for the next exhibit beginning May 14 at Arts Visalia. Brilliant colors that vibrate with intensity against each other or blend and flow in a soothing effect are portrayed in this 39-piece digital imaging show by Michelle Bussey. Bussey began her career in silk screening as a student at California State University, San Jose. Her love of serigraphy led her to teaching, first in the Madera schools with a grant from the California Arts Council. After moving to Exeter, she taught in the schools there and now designs and teaches studio art projects and art history to children and adults at Arts Visalia. She has recently ad-vanced to candidacy for the Master's Degree in art at California State University, Fresno. Bussey first learned of digital imaging while attending a computer class at College of the Sequoias. The 3DS-MAX program she uses at least one hour a day can produce 16.7 million colors through 15,000 applications. It is also an ideal medium for her busy lifestyle as the mother of six children. Prints can be easily saved during the course of many interruptions. The number of prints that can be made is limited only to the artist's budget. Artistry is again applied as the artist works with the printer to perfect the coloration process. Throughout the span of art history, new techniques and tools have created skepticism. Easels were first used in the 12th century, oil based paints in the 14th, lithography in the mid-1800s and photography in the 1900's. Over the past two decades adventurous artists have chosen to explore the computer as a tool of self-expression but not without controversy. Historically new methods do become reliable Bussey's brush is the computer. She describes her work as almost always mystical -- a series of lucky accidents. The ability to manipulate light is especially intriguing. The artist is never completely sure how their ideas will calculate through control over this "artificial intelligence" until a delightful paradox emerges. "Alchemy" is a process of transformation in the art but also within the human spirit. Bussey's teaching philosophy of art for people of all ages and abilities is: "There are no mistakes in art." This exhibit is a beautiful confirmation and a tribute to the integrity of that belief. Technology, art combine in new Visalia exhibit |
May 13, 2004
Nazi-code crackers taking on new enigmaBy JILL LAWLESS LONDON -- The experts who cracked Nazi Germany's secret codes are tackling a 10-letter enigma that has stumped fine minds for more than 250 years: D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. Former code breakers from Britain's wartime intelligence centre at Bletchley Park set out this week to decipher a cryptic inscription on an 18th-century monument at an English country estate. Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail. Some believe it is a private message to a deceased beloved. No one knows for sure. "The inscription is obviously a classical reference," said 85-year-old mathematician Oliver Lawn, a Bletchley Park veteran who is leading the quest along with his linguist wife, Sheila. "It's either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening." The mystery is carved on a marble monument tucked away in the gardens of Shugborough House in central England, the ancestral home of photographer Lord Lichfield. Based on a painting by French artist Nicholas Poussin, but carved in reverse, the etching depicts three shepherds pointing at an inscription on a tomb that reads "Et in arcadia ego" (And I am in Arcadia, too). Below the image is a line of letters -- O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V -- and beneath that, on either end, the letters D and M. Mr. Lawn, who was recruited to Bletchley Park in 1940 while studying mathematics at Cambridge University, is puzzled by the etching. "The picture's a funny one," he said. "Why it's a mirror image is very strange." Some believe the monument holds the key to finding the Holy Grail, the cup Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper. The Anson family, who built the Shugborough estate in the 17th century, had a long-standing interest in the Knights Templar, a secretive medieval order that claimed to be guardians of the grail. Shugborough spokesman Russel Gethings said the carving made significant changes to the Poussin painting that could contain clues to the code. "They changed what one of the shepherds is pointing to. He's pointing to a completely different letter than in the painting," Mr. Gethings noted. "And they've added a second sarcophagus to the picture." During the Second World War, teams of mathematicians, linguists, crossword-puzzle aficionados and chess champions worked at Bletchley Park, northwest of London (code-named Station X) to crack secret Nazi codes. Their greatest success was breaking the Enigma, the machine that produced codes used by the German navy to direct U-boat attacks on Allied convoys. The breakthrough was a major factor in the Allied victory and may have shortened the war. Christine Large, director of the Bletchley Park museum, said the monument's code is different from the mathematical ciphers used by the Nazis. "This looks to us as if it's probably going to need language expertise -- maybe skills in Greek and maybe forgotten languages -- as well as mathematics and puzzles," she said. "We have to keep an open mind about what kind of solution we're seeking here," Ms. Large said. "I think it's likely to be something more prosaic than the Holy Grail, but then most things are." Nazi-code crackers taking on new enigma |
May 13, 2004
What's in it for me, stupid?Lemurs, once believed to be cute but basically stupid, show startling intelligence when given a chance to win treats by playing a computer game, US researchers reported today. The study will help shed light on how humans became sophisticated mathematically, the Duke University team said. So far, it suggests primitive animals such as lemurs need a good reason, such as a treat, to bother trying to count. Humans and monkeys, in contrast, will stretch their minds simply out of curiosity. Lemurs are primates, as are monkeys, apes and humans. But they are considered far less intelligent. "The little bit of research that's out there suggests their learning capacities are not as sophisticated as those of monkeys," said psychologist Elizabeth Brannon, who led the research. "So initially, I thought it very unlikely that I was going to get any cognitive experiments to really work with them." But she found a combination of greed and the lure of a touch-screen computer worked to get the long-tailed animals to cooperate. "If a task involves a food reward, they can be amazing," she said. "They'll work for a couple of hundred trials because they want these sugar pellets, even though we do not deprive them of food in any way." Although lemurs are social, they would often stop what they were doing to play on the computer. "Occasionally, one animal would come over and finish the sequence started by another to get the reward," said Brannon. Unexpectedly, the lemurs could remember sequences. For instance, they showed they could remember the order of appearance of random images by touching them in order when they reappeared as a group. "It shows that the animal is actually learning some kind of strategy above and beyond what they're learning about the individual pictures in a given set," Brannon said. But the lemurs were not especially dexterous. "While monkeys will use their fingers, the ringtails (lemurs) use their nose or mouth to touch the screen, sometimes kind of kissing it," Brannon said. What's in it for me, stupid? |
May 13, 2004
'Best Minds' Sought for New Code CentreBy Helen Morgan A modern-day Bletchley Park, where the German Enigma code was cracked during the Second World War, is being set up to aid government listening post GCHQ. The new institute will employ a team of “high calibre” mathematicians to do codework. The new centre hopes to bring together “the best minds” working to protect security by tapping into the “long-standing relationships” between the intelligence community and academia. The institute, run jointly by Bristol University and Cheltenham-based GCHQ, will employ between 20 and 30 pure mathematicians. It will be in the South West and is due to open next year. A spokesman for GCHQ said the work would consist of pure mathematical exercises and look at the maths used in encryption. He said comparisons with Bletchley Park were fair. A joint statement from GCHQ and Bristol University read: “We can confirm that the new institute will be linked with a theoretical research programme into key areas of mathematics of interest to GCHQ. “The institute’s director will help recruit and then lead a team of high calibre academics working on mathematical research, not only for GCHQ but also for academic purposes. “The intelligence community has long-standing relationships with academia, particularly in the fields of science and technology. These partnerships present the opportunity to broaden theoretical work in mathematics by providing access to the widest possible pool of the best minds to help the UK retain its place at the forefront of mathematical understanding. The centre is currently advertising for a pure mathematician to act as director on a salary of £75,000. Workers at the centre must be British citizens. 'Best Minds' Sought for New Code Centre |
May 12, 2004
Robot SexTechnology Review Is your Roomba a boy or a girl? The Roomba, of course, is that clever little house-cleaning robot. I reviewed Roomba in October 2002, then bought my own a few months later. Since then it’s been happily sweeping my living room and dining room every week or so. It also terrifies my cats and my three-year-old twin boys. All well and good—but what’s the Roomba’s gender? “It’s a girl,” says my wife. “It’s round. It’s close to the floor. It ends with an ‘a’. I always think of it as a ‘wom-ba.’” Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that’s gendered than one that’s asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots’ designers to express their own playfulness and creativity. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters. As human beings, we constantly try to layer emotions, desires, and other human qualities onto our machines. Computers aren’t aware of the emotional traits that we assign to them, of course. We might say “the computer ate my file because it’s having a bad day” because we lack a better explanation for what’s happening inside the system’s microprocessor (its “brain.”) Yes, there have been attempts to develop synthetic emotions for machines, but that’s all artifice. Most people realize that fundamentally there’s nothing going on inside the silicon except the cold calculation of ones and zeros. Still, if you are interested in building an effective interface between humans and computers, you might just be better off creating a machine that projects a simulated emotional response. Because human beings are hard-wired for emotions, we might find it easier to work with such machines—especially if these machines were sharing our physical surroundings, rather than being good little drones on the factory floor or up on Mars. Such thinking is behind a growing movement in robotics to build machines that portray emotions. Last year, Neiman Marcus made the headlines by featuring a pair of "his & her" domestic robots in its Christmas catalog. Priced at $400,000, the machines were the handiwork of a small New York firm, International Robotics. You can’t find the robots on the Neiman Marcus website, but an article at the Onrobo.com website says that "his" robot (presumably the female) “is designed to respond empathetically to humans” while "her" robot “will help you carry in the groceries from the car or leave a message for your spouse.” (More coverage can be found at the AsiaOne website.) Why bring gender roles into the cybernetic age? “Because it is an essential part of how human beings can choose to be entertained and amused by the machines they will co-habit with,” says Robert Doornick, International Robotics’ president and CEO. Long term, says Doornick, “the issue of gender is more or less a choice that has to be made by the people that these robots will cohabit with.” Back at the Media Lab, graduate student Cory Kidd doesn’t deny that gender permeates the robots that he’s creating. “It’s not something we’ve given a lot of thought to building in.” But, says Kidd, “you can’t avoid it.” Just think about the classic robot of Star Wars, R2D2. “Most people would agree that it’s a boy,” says Kidd. “But I can’t think of anything that makes R2D2 gendered.” Perhaps, speculates Kidd, we think that R2D2 is a boy “because he hangs out with the guys.” Robot Sex |
May 12, 2004
This year's chairman shows `doubt and mystery'By Esther Zandberg A Rothschild Foundation seminar in Jerusalem will deal with building materials and the art of construction The sixth Jerusalem Seminar on Architecture sponsored by the Rothschild Foundation (Yad Hanadiv), will open on Sunday at the Jerusalem Convention Center and will continue for three days. The seminar will focus on "Material and Craft" and "will highlight a fundamental aspect of architecture - material and the craft allied to that which influences the basic shape and character of a building" according to the seminar theme statement. The chairman of this year's seminar is structural engineer Cecil Balmond, who heads the Europe division of the international engineering consulting firm Arup. Balmond was born in 1943 in Sri Lanka and studied engineering in Britain and the United States. In addition to being an engineer, he is also a musician and plays acoustic guitar and has written books about number theory. Balmond works regularly with architects such as Daniel Libeskind, with whom he designed, among other things, the new wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Rem Koolhaas, with whom he designed the recently dedicated new public library building in Seattle. The theoretician Charles Jencks said of the new wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum that Balmond has recreated architecture, but in London, they were less impressed and the project was frozen. Koolhaas said of Balmond that his work reflects "doubt, arbitrariness, mystery and even mysticism." In 1988 Balmond was the guest of the Jerusalem seminar and entranced a large audience with a lecture on the mysticism in mathematics and geometry. This year's chairman shows `doubt and mystery' |
May 11, 2004
Why We See What We DoA probabilistic strategy based on past experience explains the remarkable difference between what we see and physical realityDale Purves, R. Beau Lotto, Surajit Nundy Visual illusions fascinate people. What we see—whether considered in terms of the brightness of objects, their colors or their arrangement in space—is often at odds with the underlying reality measured with photometers, spectrophotometers or rulers. In the 18th century, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley provided some insight into these discrepancies. In his "Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision," Berkeley pointed out that the judgment of distance, for example, cannot be derived directly from the geometrical information in the retinal image. Thus, a given line in the retinal image could have been generated by the edge of a physically small object nearby, or equally well by an edge associated with a larger object farther away. Indeed, all retinal information suffers from this inherent ambiguity. The illumination of objects and the physical properties that determine the amount and quality of light that objects return to the eye are also conflated in the retinal stimulus; thus Berkeley's general argument applies to sensations of brightness and color, as well as to the perception of space. In each of these basic aspects of vision, the information in the retinal image cannot directly reveal the true sources of the stimulus in the physical world. As a result, the relation between the world and our perception of it is, by its nature, an uncertain one. As we show here, a growing body of evidence indicates that the visual system of humans—and presumably many other visual animals—solves Berkeley's dilemma by generating perceptions on a wholly empirical basis. Rather than analyzing the components of the retinal image as such, percepts are determined probabilistically, using feedback from the outcome of visually guided behavior in the past to progressively improve performance in the face of the inevitable uncertainty of retinal information. The result of this process, and indeed the evidence for it, is that what we perceive accords not with the features of the retinal stimulus or the properties of the underlying objects, but with what the same or similar stimuli have typically signified in both the experience of the species over the eons and the experience of individuals over their lifetimes. Taken together, this evidence drawn from the perception of brightness, color and geometry supports the idea that the problem first emphasized by Berkeley is resolved by generating visual percepts according to the probability distribution of the possible sources of the visual stimulus, whatever it may be. As a result, observers see what a visual scene typically signified in the past, rather than what it actually is in the present. We see what we do, therefore, because the statistics of past experience is the basis on which the visual system contends with the dilemma posed by the inherent ambiguity of visual stimuli. Why We See What We Do |
May 11, 2004
Advance made in pattern recognitionResearchers at Arizona State University have developed a model that could unlock how humans process patterns and possibly lead to smarter robots. "It is still a really big mystery as to how human beings can remember so many faces, but that it is extremely difficult for a computer to do," said Ying-Cheng Lai, an ASU professor of mathematics and a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. The advance concerns "oscillatory associative memory networks" -- the ability to see a pattern, store it and then retrieve that pattern when needed -- the same as how humans can recognize faces. Although what the team developed is a mathematical and computational model for networks that can be used with associated memory devices, implementation of the model is possible by using computers. Lai said the most immediate application for this research is in artificial intelligence, where researchers try to get computers to reason as a human would. The research, "Capacity of Oscillatory Associative Memory Networks with Error-Free Retrieval," was published in a recent issue of "American Physical Society's Physical Review Letters." Advance made in pattern recognition |
May 10, 2004
Computational OrigamiFuture Watch by Bob Brewin Robert Lang, a laser physicist and origami artist for more than 30 years, continues to be amazed at the potential applications of the centuries-old art of paper folding. "You would think that there is not much you can do with origami as an art form that has not been already figured out," he says. But, Lang adds, origami artists continue to "demonstrate new structures and realize new levels of beauty," a statement well supported by his own origami renderings of subjects such as cows, fish, blue herons and owls. Origami was purely a hobby for Lang until he decided to apply the kind of mathematical modeling he used in laser physics to paper folding. Lang, who is based in Alamo, Calif., now considers himself a full-time artist. He says computational origami helped him automate the process by which he determined how to make the precise kinds of folds needed to produce a multilegged insect and its antennae. After he did that, he realized that the theory and equations he developed to make better origami figures could also be applied to engineering problems in which a large surface needs to be folded to fit into a flat space without cutting. Erik Demaine, a 22-year-old professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, started folding paper at age 6 and developed that hobby into the study of the mathematics of folded forms. Demaine now studies folds in proteins, the basic building blocks of life. He believes that computational origami could fight diseases that are currently incurable, such as mad cow disease, which are caused by proteins that have what he calls "bad folds." Demaine, a 2003 winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship -- commonly known as "genius" grant -- calls protein folding his "main area of interest" and says he plans to apply what he learned from paper folding to figure out why some proteins fold into a useful shape and others do not. That research could eventually lead to the design of custom proteins that fight disease. The custom proteins could then be unleashed to destroy "bad" proteins. Ajay Royyuru, manager of the computational center at IBM Research in Yorktown, N.Y., agrees that determining the way various proteins twist and fold could help provide cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis. Computational origami could help scientists crack some basic secrets of protein structure and sequence, Royyuru says. The technology could help scientists determine why a protein falls into a specific shape "and why that shape and nothing else." High-speed computers can be used to develop "fold recognition" software and help simulate folding patterns, Royyuru says. Computational Origami |
May 9, 2004
Archaeologists discover alma mater of ArchimedesBy Thomas Maugh II A Polish-Egyptian team has unearthed the site of the fabled University of Alexandria, home of Archimedes, Euclid and a host of other scholars from the era when Alexandria dominated the Mediterranean. The team has found 13 lecture halls, or auditoriums, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archeologist Zahi Hawass, President of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. The classrooms are on the eastern edge of a large public square in the the Late Antique section of modern Alexandria and are adjacent to a previously discovered theater that is now believed to be part of the university complex, Hawass said. The new city became Egypt's capital in 320 B.C. and soon became the most powerful and influential city in the region. Its rulers built a massive lighthouse at Pharos (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), the Library of Alexandria, which was said to contain every book that had been written, and the university, which served as a teaching center for scholars from throughout the world. It was here that Archimedes invented the screw-shaped fluid pump still in use today, that Euclid invented the rules of geometry, that Hypsicles first divided the circle of the zodiac into 360 degrees, and the astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of Earth. Archaeologists discover alma mater of Archimedes |
May 9, 2004
How ungainly, large insects learned to count to 17By David Brown EVOLUTION has shown living thingsl niche into which most organisms won't dip a toe. Few strategies, however, are as strange and unlikely as the one periodical cicadas found. These large, ungainly insects in the genus Magicicada spend either 13 or 17 years underground, then emerge nearly simultaneously in densities that can exceed 1 million per acre. Their few weeks of life in the open air are spent molting, calling for a mate (in the case of the buzzing males), copulating and depositing eggs in nests made in gashed twigs (in the case of the diligent females). Most species of cicada have life cycles between two and eight years, with a fair amount of variability. If five years is the dominant length, for example, many members of a population may come out in four years -- or not until the sixth. Of course, this isn't apparent to the casual observer. That'mple, the large dog-day cicadas of the Deep South "are very fast, powerful flyers -- that's how they get away from the birds," said David Marshall, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut. On the other hand, many small species survive by being so well-camouflaged that "you can't see them even when they're a foot from your head," he said. Randel Cox of the University of Memphis and C.E. Carlton of the University of Arkansas calculated the odds of survival of populations of cicadas of different life-cycle lengths over a 1,500-year period in which 1 of every 50 summers was fatally cold. Cicadas with six-year life cycles had a 4 percent chance of surviving. Those with an 11-year cycle had a 51 percent chance. Those with a 17-year cycle had a 96 percent chance. Each time the glaciers arrived, the ice wiped out the cicadas in the northernmost regions of eastern North America, where Magicicada was evolving. But the populations south of each "glacial maximum" would have survived and kept evolving. Over millions of years of advancing and retreating ice, genes leading to long life cycles would have been favored. They would have been "enriched" in the gene pool until ultimately they became the norm. But why 13 or 17 years? Life cycles that long are mathematically more likely to have survived the Pleistocene era than shorter ones, but that doesn't explain the benefit of a prime number. It turns out that if an area contains populations of cicadas with different life-cycle lengths, broods with long cycles that are high prime numbers will share summers less often with other broods. But why is that an advantage? When broods with different cycle lengths emerge at the same time, some members will interbreed. Their offspring will be hybrids, carrying a mixture of genes. If the precise timing of a cicada's life cycle is produced by the interaction of several genes, then getting those genes from two different populations might change the interaction. That might affect the length of the life cycle. If the offspring of 11-year and six-year cicadas are cicadas of a third cycle length -- say, nine years -- then the number of insects emerging on either parent's schedule in the next generation will decrease. That, in turn, will diminish the strength-in-numbers produce mongrel offspring. A 16-year brood will share a mating season with two-, four- and eight-year broods, and an even more diverse group of hybrids will result. In contrast, when 13- and 17-year broods are out, they share the season only with broods having short life cycles (such as one, two or three years) -- and life cycles that short presumably couldn't survive the Pleistocene climate. The net result was that 13- or 17-year cicadas didn't have their genes "diluted" by hybridization -- except every 221 years, when they were out together in the few places where they shared the same turf. Of course, periodical species didn't pick 13 and 17 as their magic numbers. As with all evolutionary processes, choice played no part. What happened, instead, was that broods of other cycle lengths simply became extinct. They emerged in a cold summer and failed to reproduce, or they emerged in insufficient numbers and were eliminated by predators. What remained were the broods mathematically most likely to make it across the Pleistocene minefield -- 13 and 17. Furthermore, in those populations synchronicity was essential. Individuals whose timing was off just a little -- ones that emerged a year early or late -- were extirpated. But their brethren whose genes endowed them with perfect timing generation after generation, survived. How ungainly, large insects learned to count to 17 |
May 8, 2004
Abacus aid to math masterySAMARPAN DUTTA AND DEBASISH CHATTERJEE You want your child to make a career in the sciences, but he shies away from all things mathematical. Help is a stone’s throw away, in the form of an institute. International Mental Arithmetic Academy, based in Chennai, helps children develop mathematical skills and improve their level of concentration through easy and accessible methods. It’s due to debut in the city shortly. “Mental arithmetic is a form of calculation that is done entirely in the mind, without any physical or electronic gadgets. We have adopted a method from the Chinese and use the Zhusuan, or abacus, as the primary tool to teach children easy methods of solving mathematical problems,” explained Gunjan Tibrawalla, directress of Innocent Smiles, at Gurusaday Road, south Calcutta. Scientific and linguistic studies have revealed that mental abilities in children develop till age 12 and the degree of mental development, achieved by a child during this period, has a great impact on his future. “That is why the programme has been designed for children in the four-to-12 age-group. At this age, learning should be fun, and the abacus is a learning tool that provides a simple but interesting way of solving mathematical problems,” Tibrawalla added. The institute offers a 34-month course to assist children get over their fear of numerical representations and then help them improve mathematical skills. “Our primary aim is to get the child to feel at home with numbers and recognise them, vis-a-vis mathematical problems. To begin with, we will teach them the use of the tool. Then, they will be taught to solve simple problems and proceed to more complex ones,” she explained. Mental arithmetic has benefits other than developing mathematical skills. It helps develop analytical and logical thinking and increases the power of concentration, claims the academy. A group of experts on mental arithmetic were in the city to hold a workshop on May 6, at which dignitaries from Chennai — the Indian head office — briefed them on the use of the abacus and its effect on the human brain. About 100 participants attended, including several representing the leading schools in the city. Abacus aid to math mastery |
May 8, 2004
Mathematical SequencesI've been working on developing a Fibonacci inspired mathematical sequence as a tool for predicting lottery draws. I've read at least one source that claims this won't work because lottery draws are not naturally occurring phenomena. I happen to think that we and all we do are products of nature, so I'm convinced that a mathematical sequence can be a useful predictor. A couple of nights ago I managed to stumble onto creating a sequence that seems to offer quite a bit of promise. It seems to go beyond the fatal degeneracy of producing a pattern, and I think I've found a way to guarantee that numbers which fall within the parameters of any pool of lottery numbers can be abstracted without bias . I'm not entirely sure of how to apply what I've come up with, but I'm thinking that if I extend the sequence far enough, I can find a point at which it precisely reflects the actual draw history of any given game. From there it should be a simple matter to accurately predict and win a lottery jackpot. Well, at least I'm hoping it will be so simple. Does anyone else here have any experince with the development and application of mathematical sequences as predictors for lottery drawings? I'd certainly like to hear input from anyone who has tried this. I have quite a bit of work to do in extending the sequence I've come up with, but it looks entirely workable to me. Maybe some of you could point out other considerations that I might be overlooking in this pursuit. I've put quite a bit of work in on this, but I still have an open mind for new ideas and angles on it. I welcome any meaningful input that anyone can contribute. Thanks to all in advance. Mathematical Sequences |
May 7, 2004
MIT looks to liven campus with Gehry's Stata CenterBy Paul Roberts History was in the making on Wednesday, when luminaries from the worlds of academia, computer science and architecture gathered on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to celebrate, of all things, a building: the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. Designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, the fantastical, new 730,000 square foot complex will house researchers in computer science, linguistics and philosophy and is scheduled to open its doors on Friday. The school's administrators and faculty hailed the new center as a way to encourage collaboration and information exchange between disparate fields, according to MIT, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT had students and faculty out on Wednesday to demonstrate some of the futuristic technology that will be developed within the Stata Center's walls. Reporters were treated to demonstrations of everything from robots that can sense and react to physical objects, to "magic paper" that can understand and interpret drawings and sketches. To encourage collaboration and "accidental" encounters, the Stata Center's interior is divided into smaller "neighborhoods" that feature open lab space lined with closed offices and often visible from walkways above and below. Time and again, when touring the building, windows open views onto vast, open interior spaces, rather than the outside world, giving the building's occupants a peek at activities and discussions in other parts of the building. Erik Demaine, an assistant professor in CSAIL, said he liked the "far out crazy geometry" of the new center. Of course, Demaine's expertise in "origami mathematics," the mathematical study of paper folding and "computational origami," which develops algorithms for solving paper-folding problems, gives him a unique perspective on the building's design. World Wide Web inventor and Stata Center occupant Tim Berners-Lee, a senior research scientist at MIT, likened the new building to the Web, which thrived because it was not rigidly structured and gave Web surfers many different ways for getting to the information they wanted. But the new center will have a hard enough time just living up to the reputation of the structure it replaced. Known as "Building 20," the temporary, wood frame barracks-style building was constructed during World War II to house the Radiation Laboratory, which developed radar technology that helped lead to an Allied victory in the War. After the war, the building housed interdisciplinary laboratories such as the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, the offices of MIT's linguistics program and the offices of famous scholar Noam Chomsky, MIT said. Despite the building's sophisticated design, which Gehry completed with the help of three dimensional computer aided mechanical design product called CATIA made by Dassault Systemes, the Stata Center is intended to be easy to modify, just like its predecessor, Building 20. "There's nothing precious in these forms. The idea of Building 20 is that you should be free to tinker," Gehry said. Though MIT staff have been moving into the building for months, the Stata Center will officially open its doors to the world on Friday. MIT has assigned the new building number 32 which, Brooks reminded the crowd, is just "20" expressed in hexadecimal form. MIT looks to liven campus with Gehry's Stata Center |
May 6, 2004
Human Brain Works Heavy Statistics Learning LanguageUniversity Of Rochester A team at the University of Rochester has found that the human brain makes much more extensive use of highly complex statistics when learning a language than scientists ever realized. The research, appearing in a recent issue of Cognitive Psychology, shows that the human brain is wired to quickly grasp certain relationships between spoken sounds even though those relationships may be so complicated they're beyond our ability to consciously comprehend. "We're starting to learn just how intuitively our minds are able to analyze amazingly complex information without our even being aware of it," says Elissa Newport, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University and lead author of the study. "There is a powerful correlation between what our brains are able to do and what language demands of us." So how is a baby supposed to make out where one word begins and another ends? Newport and Aslin devised a test where babies and adults listened to snippets of a synthetic language: a few syllables arranged into nonsense words and played in random order for 20 minutes. During that time, the listeners were taking in information about the syllables, such as how often each occurred, and how often they occurred in relation to other syllables. For instance, in the real words "pretty baby," the syllable "pre" is followed by "ty," which happens more frequently in English than the syllable "ty" being followed by "ba"--thus the brain notes that "ty" is more likely to be associated with "pre" than with "ba," and so we hear a pause between those two syllables. After listening to the synthesized string of syllables for the full 20 minutes, adults were played some of the invented words along with some words made up of syllables from the beginning and ending of words--like "ty-ba." More than 85 percent of the time, adults were able to recognize words from non-words. Five-year-olds also reacted definitively to words and non-words, showing that the human mind is wired to statistically track how often certain sounds arise in relationship to other sounds. "If you were given paper and a calculator, you'd be hard-pressed to figure out the statistics involved," says Newport. "Yet after listening for a while, certain syllables just pop out at you and you start imagining pauses between the 'words.' It's a reflection of the fact that somewhere in your brain you're actually absorbing and processing a staggering amount of information." titolo |
May 6, 2004
Virtual skin looking even betterBy Alfred Hermida It you get a close look at some of the creatures of the night in the Van Helsing movie, you might notice how realistic their skin looks. The reason is a program that works out how light affects surfaces like skin to make computer-generated characters look more believable. The software was first used on Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and is now a staple of blockbusters packed with visual effects. The man behind the technique, Dr Henrik Jensen of the University of California at San Diego, was recently rewarded for his contribution to Hollywood. The secret in making virtual skin seem real is all to do with light. Dr Jensen found that light did not just bounce from surfaces such as marble and skin. Instead light beams penetrate below the surface and scatter at different points. "I was involved in a project where we wanted to simulate weathering of marble," recalls Dr Jensen of his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. "One night I illuminated the marble material with a laser-pointer and I noticed how the marble started glowing and how the red light from the laser-pointer even caused a glow on the backside of the material." This led him to study how light scattered inside materials like marble. The breakthrough came three years later while at Stanford University. Dr Jensen managed to come up with a mathematical formula that calculates how light is absorbed and dispersed beneath materials like marble or skin. "The development of the mathematical model was the most difficult aspect of the project," he told BBC News Online. "It required a number of new algorithms and techniques not previously seen in computer graphics." Virtual skin looking even better |
May 6, 2004
Invasion of the BroodThe 17-year cicadas are about to emerge in force LIKE the climax of a bad sci-fi movie, a plague of biblical proportions will soon hit the eastern part of the United States. Not overgrown rabbits, nor killer tomatoes, but numberless insects. For sometime after May 10th (the exact date depends on the weather over the next few days), Brood X of the 17-year cicada will surface. The outbreak will be densest in the mid-west, around Indiana, where 3.5m insects per hectare are expected to emerge. But lesser plagues will hit places as far apart as Maryland and Missouri. Though Brood X is the largest, it is only one of a number of broods of so-called periodical cicadas that emerge at intervals of either 13 or 17 years. This is the period of time that the cicada nymphs remain underground, feeding on sap from tree roots until their biological alarm-clocks go off. When that happens they all simultaneously mature, emerge, mate, lay eggs if female, and then die. Most biologists believe that the odd lifestyle of periodical cicadas is an example of a survival strategy called “predator satiation”: the insects emerge in such prodigious quantities that predators cannot possibly eat them all. And their curious prime-numbered lifecycles may be another anti-predator strategy. Glenn Webb, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has demonstrated mathematically that prime-numbered lifecycles could help cicadas avoid damaging “resonances” with the two- and three-year population fluctuations of their predators. These would result in lots of predators being around in years when there were lots of prey. Dr Webb's model shows that, over a 200-year period, average predator populations during hypothetical outbreaks of 14- and 15-year cicadas would be up to 2% higher than during outbreaks of 13- and 17-year cicadas. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to drive natural selection towards a prime-numbered life-cycle. Only one predator—or, rather, parasite—is known to have overcome this anti-resonance strategy, by developing its own 17-year clock. Massospora cicadina, a fungus, lives in cicada larvae and passes between adults when they mate. But according to Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at the College of Mount St Joseph, in Cincinnati, Ohio, natural selection is working against this resonance too. In 2000, he recorded thousands of Brood X members emerging four years early—in other words, shifting to a 13-year cycle that Massospora is not equipped to match. Lo and behold, when Dr Kritsky examined several dozen members of the “accelerated” Brood X that emerged in 2000, he found only one infected female among them, and she had but one fungal spore. By contrast, he found from 50 to 300 spores in each cicada female from another brood that emerged on time that year in North Carolina. Brood X, it seems, is splitting up, and a new 13-year cicada population is evolving. Meanwhile, Keith Clay, of Indiana University in Bloomington, is studying the idea that periodical-cicada broods are getting bigger over the decades. Dr Clay's reasoning is that changes made to the vegetation of the eastern United States over the past century have created a habitat that is ideal for cicadas. Female cicadas have to be careful when they choose a tree in which to lay their eggs. Those eggs are deposited in the tree's branches, but when they hatch (which they do two weeks after being laid), the resulting larvae fall to the ground and tunnel down to the tree's roots, from which they suck their sustenance. If a female chooses poorly and the tree dies in the next 17 years, her larvae will die too. They will also do badly if the tree has old, gnarled roots, rather than young, succulent ones. Until the arrival of European settlers, most of the area the cicadas inhabit was forest—on the face of it, a good habitat for the insects. But Dr Clay's early research suggests that “suburban savannahs” (leafy avenues, lawns with the odd sapling growing in them, and golf courses) are actually better for the insects than the forests which preceded suburbanisation. Suburban trees tend to be younger and healthier. They also have to compete less fiercely for resources than trees in dense forests. And younger trees probably have tastier roots as well. The ancient forests of pre-Columbian America would not have provided such sumptuous dining. Dr Clay's research builds on data that generations of Indiana's entomologists have been gathering at 17-year intervals for over a century. He estimates, though, that he will need results from at least three more Brood X outbreaks to draw firm conclusions about cicadas' habitat preferences. Like his forward-looking predecessors, he will have to rely on future generations of entomologists to ensure that his labours bear fruit. Many entomologists in the American mid-west, it seems, are also now on a 17-year cycle. Invasion of the Brood |
May 6, 2004
The Golden Mean and Pairs of OppositesAKHIL CHANDRA We live in a world of opposites where gain and loss, good and bad, pleasure and pain, life and death are as inevitable as the two sides of a coin. Yet, there is an underlying unity between the two contrasts. One of the principal polarities in life is the one between the male and female side of human nature. The sublime union between these two aspects is symbolised by Lord Siva's depiction as a dynamic unification of the two, as the half-male, half-female Ardhanareeshwar. In real life, too, there is a constant dynamic interplay between the two extremes of opposites and one has to strike a balance between the two. For this, we need to maintain a balance between good and bad, between winning and losing, and so on. This will help us to follow the path of right conduct in an unattached and fearless manner. In modern science, existence of opposite extremes in nature is best described by the concept of positively and negatively charged particles of matter which combine during chemical reaction to achieve neutrality. Mathematically, also, equal positive and negative values add up to zero, mingling into oneness. The simple rhythmic motion of a pendulum has two opposite extremes of movement. The same principle is widely visible in the nature of day and night, light and darkness, heat and cold. According to Indian thought also opposites are merely two sides of the same reality and can ultimately be reconciled in a single whole. The Bhagavad Gita asks us to lead the unattached life of a self-controlled man, a karma yogi unmoved by pairs of opposites: "The Supreme Spirit is rooted in the knowledge of the self-controlled man whose mind is perfectly serene in the midst of pairs of opposites, such as cold and heat, joy and sorrow and honour and ignominy." Chinese sages called this dynamic interplay of two extremes as Ying and Yang — positive and negative — and have extended this thought extensively to the function of daily life. The Sufi saw merging of opposites in the unity of Brahman, the world-soul, and Atman, the individual soul. The path to enlightenment, then, involves the realisation of this and moving beyond it, to where one sees everything as part of the ultimate reality. Sufism says that it is not very important to distinguish between two opposites. It is more important to recognise that One that is hidden, and opposites are simply the manifestation of a basic oneness. Sufis believed that the 'real' world (maya) is made up of opposites and is illusory (mithya). The philosophy of unification of opposites is omnipresent in Indian thought. The word 'yoga' comes from the Sanskrit word Yuj meaning to join or unite. It is the union of all aspects of the individual body, mind and soul. Hence, yoga reunites all opposites — mind and body, stillness and movement, masculine and feminine — in order to bring about re-conciliation between them. For everything there is a complementary part representing the other part of extreme. In our daily life we should reconcile the play of opposites. This will allow us the possibility of accommodating widely divergent human experiences in an underlying harmony, bringing newer prospects and ethical views for the exploration and mitigation of human suffering. If we adopt the complementary approach to problems we may discover to our pleasant surprise that seemingly irreconcilable points of view need not be contradictory but can make possible the striking of a balance between extremes. You cannot always win or lose or be happy or sad — so go on, find the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean and Pairs of Opposites |
May 6, 2004
Cicadas' bizarre survival strategy |
May 6, 2004
Computational biology startup has excited backersBy JOHN COOK OVP Venture Partners is placing another bet in the field of computational biology. The Kirkland venture capital firm, which was an early backer of Rosetta Inpharmatics, has made a commitment to invest in NanoString Technologies. An early-stage Seattle company that was formed at Leroy Hood's Institute for Systems Biology, NanoString is currently looking to raise $8 million in venture capital. OVP managing director Chad Waite, who plans to lead the investment, is taking an active role in the company's financing efforts by rounding up other investors. Waite also helped recruit H. Perry Fell, the 46-year-old former Seattle Genetics chairman who took over the chief executive post of the startup earlier this month. In 1998, OVP provided startup capital to Seattle Genetics. "I think it is an incredible opportunity," Waite said. "There are competitive efforts going on to approach this problem in different ways, but I think this one is elegant, very flexible and very powerful." Although OVP curtailed investments in biotechnology and medical device companies two years ago, the venture capital firm's involvement with NanoString is not a total surprise. Waite maintains a curiosity in the intersection of computers and medicine, sometimes referred to as computational biology. The year-old company, which won the top prize at the University of Washington Business Plan Competition last year, describes its technology as a "biological operating system" that can identify multiple genes or molecules in 30 minutes or less. It does this by affixing a bar code, or "NanoString," to each molecule and then setting up an inventory system that can quickly count the molecules. That could have wide-ranging implications in drug discovery, clinical testing, food safety, bioterrorism and other areas. For example, water samples from a city's aquifer could be quickly analyzed for pathogens or multiple blood samples could be checked for diseases. "It is significantly faster and easier" than current micro array technologies, Waite said. Computational biology startup has excited backers |
May 6, 2004
'Quantum revolution' will power future technologyBy Tom Siegfried and Alexandra Witze If you thought quantum physics was too weird to worry about, start worrying anyway. The physics version of voodoo is poised to transform the world's economy and invade daily life. Sometime this century, scientists say, "quantum technology" will transform the stuff of science-fiction novels and Star Trek episodes into lucrative new industries. In the process, unfathomably strange aspects of nature that are usually confined to the subatomic world will turn up instead in offices and homes. Quantum technology could spawn superfast computers, able to solve math problems in seconds that would take today's best Pentiums billions of years. Other quantum-tech offspring might include powerful new microscopes, super-efficient solar panels and eagle-eyed instruments for oil prospecting from space. "There are some remarkable, amazing things coming down the line," said Carl Williams, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. "They will move into your everyday life." 'Quantum revolution' will power future technology |
May 5, 2004
Mathematical group's calculations can plot the path of Sars, smoke or seedlingsBy SIMON COLLINS A group that used mathematics to predict the spread of diseases such as Sars and smallpox is now trying to stop unwanted pine trees spreading across prime New Zealand farmland. The expert mathematicians group, led by Professor Graeme Wake at Massey University's Albany campus, has developed a mathematical model for the spread of pine seedlings in Canterbury based on wind directions, the local landscape and the weight of seed dispersed from each tree. Environment Canterbury ecologist Dr Philip Grove said the pine seedlings model confirmed his intuition that the best way to stop pines spreading was to eradicate the youngest and most distant seedlings first. "The pine forests are spread all over the region," he said. "A lot were put in by the old Electricity Department around lakes such as Tekapo. There are pine forests at Hanmer, and there was erosion control planting in the 1950s and 1960s." The seedlings problem was one of six presented in January to a transtasman "mathematics in industry" study group which has met in Australian state capitals for the past 20 years. Associate Professor Mick Roberts, a former AgResearch mathematician hired by Massey last year, said it was "a purely logical exercise" to turn the seedlings problem into mathematical equations. "You ask how many seeds does a conifer produce a day, then you have to count where they go to and where they land," he said. "You have to look at how they spread, which is down to what is going to blow them. Dr Roberts, who worked at AgResearch on the spread of tuberculosis in possums, was asked first by New Zealand's Health Ministry and then by the World Health Organisation to model the potential spread of Sars when the disease broke out in Asia last year. "I could produce a model quickly because I was working on one for the Ministry of Health on smallpox - what would happen if that got into the country," he said. The main conclusion for Sars and smallpox was that anyone showing possible symptoms of the disease should be isolated immediately. Sars victims showed symptoms after about four days, but were infectious for up to two weeks. "If you isolate them within a day or two [of showing symptoms], then you have prevented about two-thirds of the infection they were going to pass on," he said. "The object is to make sure a person infects an average of less than one other person, because then the numbers infected will gradually drop. Mathematical group's calculations can plot the path of Sars, smoke or seedlings |
May 4, 2004
Poker researchers betting on world-class softwareDespite an unsavory past, poker has exploded onto television screens in North America and a University of Alberta spin-off company is hoping to cash in on the high stakes industry. Spin-off company, BioTools, is using U of A research to launch its online poker game development aimed to help novices and experts improve their playing ability. "We are getting closer to beating the best players in the world," said Darse Billings, a former professional poker player and U of A PhD student working on the project. "Our current programs can acquit themselves quite well against strong opposition, and they continue to become stronger as the research progresses. I do not believe they are superior to the best humans yet, but I believe that day will come--possible within the next year or two." The software, marketed as Poki's Poker Academy, learns patterns and adopts to various playing styles. Not just a poker game, the complex learning tool can display odds, variables, can graph results as well as the likelihood of certain poker situations. It forces an opponent to continually change strategies and adapt their play, as it will attempt to exploit any and all weakness or predictability it finds in their playing style. Although, this new poker player never tires or sweats it does hold a crucial tool--the ability to bluff. The development is taken from artificial intelligence research created by the same U of A group who created a checkers playing program named Chinook. Chinook became the best checkers playing entity on the planet, eventually winning a checkers world championship by defeating competitors in qualifying tournaments and leaving a trail of stunned human players in its wake. The program is based on game theory, a formula developed by Nobel laureate John Nash, the mathematician featured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." This branch of mathematics studies the interactions between people, companies or countries who are in competition. Poker researchers betting on world-class software |
May 4, 2004
Triad Stage production of Proof falls short of geniusMeredith Veto The theme of "tortured genius" is often romanticized. Masterminds in all fields, from musicians to scientists, are portrayed as eccentrics that push themselves to mental and physical extremes. Proof, a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play now running at Triad Stage, is no different. A brilliant mathematician dies, leaving behind hundreds of notebooks of mathematical scribblings. His two daughters, Catherine and Claire, and ex-student Hal deal with what remains of his legacy, through memories and the potentially groundbreaking proofs lying undiscovered in his old house. A mathematician herself, Catherine struggles with the fear of inheriting the crippling psychosis that left her father mentally unable to function. The play takes place on the back porch of the mathematician's house, now occupied by Catherine. By far the most praiseworthy feature of the production was the set, designed by Fred Kinney. It included an elaborate two-story Victorian-style house, complete with furnishings that could be seen through the kitchen window, and surrounded by natural elements such as trees and grass. The exasperated Catherine, played by Elizabeth Kaplow, lolls about on a wooden chair on the back patio for much of the play, spouting expletives and delivering every sentence with a dry punch. Kaplow's caustic expression, however, lacked variation; she resorted to volume increase rather than change in tone to emphasize irony. In fact, the actors quickly exhausted the mannerisms of their characters, with the exception of Richard J. Canzano, who plays Hal. Claire, with her lattés, hurried pace, and no-nonsense attitude, epitomized the insensitive New Yorker. As Claire, Kim Stauffer spoke in the clichéd, condescending tone of the cosmopolitan elite, and every move she made became predictable. Martin Rader, playing the zealous mathematical genius Robert, became the definition of melodrama. His oddities were often used as comic relief, so when his chance to shine, i.e. schizophrenic breakdown, finally came, his fervent body shaking and pained grimace seemed vastly out of place. Canzano, playing Robert's less talented disciple, must be ch the dialogue. Mathematics becomes a way for the characters to work through their problems, from relationships to depression. Triad Stage production of Proof falls short of genius |
May 4, 2004
'Human calculator' simplifies mathSTEVE KUCHERA Ask Scott Flansburg to keep adding 47 to itself and he does so in a verbal blur of numbers that quickly and correctly reaches 1,880. Ask him to multiply numbers, divide numbers or find the cube root of numbers. He completes the calculations while others are still fumbling with a calculator. Flansburg brought his show and his message that everyone is capable of learning better math skills to the state conference of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of Mathematics on Saturday. About 1,200 math teachers, ranging from kindergarten to college level, attended the conference at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. "His ability to manipulate numbers is just astounding," council president-elect Karen Coblentz said. "So it's fun for people to see that yeah, calculators help people but mental math is important as well." To make math more popular, Flansburg is helping organize the first-ever counting bee in November, with a top prize of $100,000. Details are still being worked out, and more information should come out on his Web site this summer. The counting bee will be a speed event, much like Flansburg's demonstration on April 27, 2000, that earned him the Guinness Book of World Records title of "fastest human calculator." According to the 2003 edition of the book, Flansburg "correctly added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times in 15 seconds without the use of a calculator." 'Human calculator' simplifies math |
May 3, 2004
Cactus Patterns Buckle UpErica Klarreich The intricate spiral patterns displayed in cacti, pinecones, sunflowers, and other plants often encode the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, . . . , in which each element is the sum of the two preceding numbers. Now a mathematical model published in the 23 April PRL suggests that these spiral patterns, and the Fibonacci relationships among the spirals, arise out of simple mechanical forces acting on a growing plant. To test the idea, mathematicians Patrick Shipman and Alan Newell of the University of Arizona in Tucson created a mathematical model of cactus growth that takes into account the elastic properties and stresses on the plant's growing tip. The pair then computed the buckling patterns that are most stable. Newell says the stable configurations have precisely three families of spiral waves, with spirals from all three families intersecting at each sticker. Once formed, the spirals tend to reinforce each other and suppress any other arrangement. The Fibonacci relationship then comes from geometry: The three sets of spirals divide the plant's surface into triangles with curved sides, and according to textbook math, a surface "tiled" with such triangles has special properties. Of the three sets of spirals that form the triangles' borders, the number of branches in two of the sets must add up to the number in the third. Shipman cautions that not all sets of numbers with this additive relationship are members of the Fibonacci sequence, but the relationship does make the Fibonacci numbers plausible in plants. In computer simulations, the team produced patterns almost identical to those found in living cacti. Cactus Patterns Buckle Up |
May 3, 2004
Injectable Medibots: Programmable DNA could diagnose and treat cancerAlexandra Goho Scientists have created a miniature medical computer out of DNA that can detect cancer genes in a test tube and respond by releasing a drug. Proving what had been only a concept, the feat offers a vision of how medicine might look in the future. A few years ago, Ehud Shapiro and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, developed a molecular computer out of DNA. It was capable of performing simple computations (Math Trek, Science News Online: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020119/mathtrek.asp). In this biological nanocomputer, strands of DNA serve as software that control the activity of enzymes. The tiny device is listed in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest biological computing device. Trillions of these DNA-based computers could fit into a single drop of water. Even so, it takes sophisticated lab equipment to extract results from the nanocomputers, so they're unlikely to outdo silicon-based electronic computers, says Shapiro. That's why the Israeli team of computer scientists and biochemists pursued a different application: a DNA computer that could by itself diagnose and treat disease. In a positive diagnosis of malignancy, the computer's transition molecules detect changes in the activity of all four of a cancer's genes. When the molecules determine that all four genes have abnormal activities, the enzyme cuts the computation module so that it releases the drug. However, even if the activity of only one of the four genes is normal, the diagnosis is "not cancerous." In these cases, the enzyme cuts off a different strand of the computer's DNA, which neutralizes the drug. If the computer releases the drug by accident, a separate component keeps the system in check by simultaneously releasing the drug suppressor. The researchers describe their computer in an upcoming Nature. Injectable Medibots: Programmable DNA could diagnose and treat cancer |
May 2, 2004
Teaching isn't mere spoon-feedingby Nate Laurie Anyone who has been to university would have responded in a predictable manner to education reporter Louise Brown's story in Monday's Star about professors who can't teach: "So what else is new?" Universities have always been a refuge for people who jealously guard the time they have for their own work and thoughts. Describing his own reasons for choosing "teaching" as a profession, Albert Einstein wrote: "Above all, it is my disposition for abstract and mathematical thought, and my lack of imagination and practical ability." So how does one teach abstract and mathematical thought? Many years ago I took a course in mathematical analysis from a famous professor who started off every lecture with a proof of some abstract theorem that was fully developed in the textbook. (The Bolzano-Weirstrauss theorem springs to mind, even though I no longer have any idea what it says.) But he never completed one proof. Halfway through the theorem, he would go off on a tangent about the life of the mathematician who had thought it up. His lectures were fascinating, even though all the students knew it was up to them to learn the course on their own. By contrast, my son's calculus instructor this year reproduced every theorem in the text on the blackboard. But is that teaching math? My son, and many of his classmates, eventually decided that their time was better spent simply reading the textbook themselves. This isn't meant to be a put-down of the professor, but to highlight just how difficult it is to add value to material that is well presented in a single book. My point is simply this. Spoon-feeding bright, young adults easily accessible material isn't teaching — at least not at the university level. As University of Toronto's highly popular psychology professor Marty Wall so aptly put it, "Where students really learn is on their own, reading, working, thinking, so my job in class is to motivate them to want to go off and do that." But that's where hard work, dedication and creativity come into play — three critical elements that too many university professors studiously avoid. A good teacher is always searching for new ways to encourage students to look at a problem or issue from different perspectives, to think in new ways. A good teacher synthesizes vast areas of knowledge for students that they couldn't hope to cover in a one-semester course, and in the process feeds their desire to learn even more. A good teacher makes his or her course relevant to the world students live in and to the issues they care about. And most important, to be a good teacher, a professor must not only love his or her subject, but have a missionary zeal to want to make students fall in love, too. I'm afraid, however, that the nature of the beast is such that too many professors would rather run back to their labs or their research than spend half an hour after class with students eager to discuss their own insights on a one-to-one level. That's why I see little prospect for change, and why I tell my three children now in university that if they are inspired by five professors by the time they graduate they should consider themselves lucky. Let's face it. There is no Nobel Prize for teaching, which brings me to my final anecdote. When I thought about giving up university teaching for a job in Ottawa early on in my career, the chairman of my department called me into his office, and told me that if I decided to stay, my reward would be that I didn't have to teach a course for a full year. Teaching isn't mere spoon-feeding |
May 1, 2004
Haussler honored by computer science group as an innovator who changed the scientific worldTim Stephens The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named David Haussler, professor of computer science and director of UCSC's Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE), a corecipient of the 2003 Allen Newell Award. Haussler was recognized along with UCLA computer scientist Judea Pearl for separate groundbreaking contributions that have changed the scientific world beyond computer science and engineering. Haussler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was cited as possibly the most influential contributor to the field of computational biology. Pearl, director of UCLA's Cognitive Systems Laboratory, made seminal contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. As the recipients of the 2003 Allen Newell Award, they demonstrate the remarkable influence that computer science and artificial intelligence can have on other sciences, on practical tools, and on human thought. The Allen Newell Award, which is cosponsored by ACM and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), comes with a cash prize of $10,000. By focusing on scientific interactions between computer scientists and molecular biologists, Haussler has played a leading role in developing the new field of computational biology. His work laid the foundation for the modern probabilistic approach to detecting and analyzing the biological components of the human genome. His collaborations led to algorithms to assemble the first public working draft of the human genome and posting it on the World Wide Web. He also aided in developing interactive web-based browsers that analyzed and annotated genome sequences of human beings and other organisms. These web-based tools are used extensively in biomedical research. Haussler honored by computer science group as an innovator who changed the scientific world |