Mathematical Bonanza with Shakuntala Devi recorded in 1977 and presented by Doordarshan Archives. Shakuntala Devi (4 November 1929 – 21 April 2013) was an Indian writer and mental calculator, popularly known as the "human computer".
Behind the dead-water phenomenon
What makes a ship halt even when the engines are at full blast? A strange and as of yet not well understood wave phenomena known as dead water.
Why astrologers were the original data scientists
Alexander Boxer's new book, "A Scheme of Heaven: the History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data", explores the surprising history of astrology and the mass collection of data on the motions of the heavens.
Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math
``Three physicists wanted to calculate how neutrinos change.
They ended up discovering an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math.''
Black Hole Harmonics
When physicists talk about black holes they're usually referring to highly theoretical objects - static, unchanging black holes viewed from "infinitely" far away.
This makes everything clean and simple enough to attempt the already notoriously complex calculations of black hole physics.
But real black holes are created in the violent deaths of massive stars, and there's nothing clean about that.
And we now know that black holes merge - and in the process produce gravitational radiation that we've only just managed to detect with the miraculous work of the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave observatories.
In the instant after its merger, the new, joined black hole looks nothing like the idealized theoretical black hole.
Illusive patterns in math explained by ideas in physics
Patterns appear widely throughout nature and math, from the Fibonacci spirals of
sea shells to the periodicity of crystals. But certain math problems can sometimes
trick the human solver into seeing a pattern, but then, out of the blue, the pattern suddenly disappears.
Escher: The Exhibition and Experience
The Exhibition & Experience, an exhibition of over 200 works by the iconic Dutch artist M.C. Escher, from June 8th, 2018 to February 3rd, 2019 at Brooklyn's Industry City.
The Minds of Men: Official Documentary
"The Minds of Men is a 3+ year investigation into the experimentation, art,
and practice of social engineering and mind control during the Cold War
- a mind-bending journey into the past that gives startling insight
into the world we are living in today."
Note: See the discussion of Wiener and harmonic analysis at 2:59:44 for the
following few minutes, including a scene in which they show some
harmonic analysis on a page, and play some ominous music
(at 3:00:16 or so). After that, they discuss the auto correlator machine.
NWC September Math Links: Prime Numbers and The Riemann Hypothesis, by
Barry Mazur and William Stein
"This book is a soaring ride, starting from the simplest ideas and ending with one of the deepest unsolved problems of mathematics. Unlike in many popular math books puffed up with anecdotal material, the authors here treat the reader as seriously interested in prime numbers and build up the real math in four stages with compelling graphical demonstrations revealing in deeper and deeper ways the hidden music of the primes. If you have ever wondered why so many mathematicians are obsessed with primes, here's the real deal."
David Mumford, Brown University, Rhode Island
Book World: How the subatomic world defies our sense of logic.
Margaret Wertheim, in The Washington Post Book World, reviews:
What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, by Adam Becker.
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different, by Philip Ball.
Generalized Hardy's paradox shows an even stronger conflict between quantum and classical physics
In 1993, physicist Lucien Hardy proposed an experiment showing that there is a small probability (around 6-9 percent)
of observing a particle and its antiparticle interacting with each other without annihilating - something that
is impossible in classical physics. The way to explain this result is to require quantum theory to be nonlocal:
that is, to allow for the existence of long-range quantum correlations, such as entanglement, so that particles
can influence each other across long distances.
Abel Prize 2017 for Yves Meyer Article in the Austrian Math. Soc. IMN by Hans G. Feichtinger (Univ. Wien). The Abel Prize 2017 was awarded
to Yves Meyer, mostly for his work concerning wavelets. It is the purpose of the review article to explain the background and application
areas of wavelet theory, indicate the connections to Gabor analysis and time-frequency analysis and share some personal experiences.
How to Use a Sphere to Talk to Mars How high-dimensional spheres can be used to make codes passing though noisy channels more robust.
University of Maryland Professor, Alexander Barg, is quoted.
Cheney Awarded Kovalevsky Lectureship
Margaret Cheney of Colorado State University has been chosen as the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer for 2013 by the Association
for Women in Mathematics (AWM).
Radar and Shakespeare? A radar scan of William Shakespeare's
supposed tomb in a Stratford church came up empty, fueling the old debate about who really wrote the famous plays and sonnets.
Researchers prove Huygens was right about pendulum synchronization
In 1665 Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks, hung from the same wooden structure, will always oscillate in synchronicity.
Today, some 350 years on, Eindhoven and Mexican researchers present the most accurate and detailed description of this 'Huygens synchronization'
to date in the journal Scientific Reports.
The moon thought to play a major role in maintaining Earth's magnetic field
The Earth's magnetic field permanently protects us from the charged particles and radiation that originate in the sun. This shield is produced by the geodynamo,
the rapid motion of huge quantities of liquid iron alloy in the Earth's outer core. To maintain this magnetic field until the present day, the classical model
required the Earth's core to have cooled by around 3,000 C over the past 4.3 billion years. Now, a team of researchers from CNRS and Universite Blaise Pascal1
suggests that, on the contrary, its temperature has fallen by only 300 C. The action of the moon, overlooked until now, is thought to have compensated for this
difference and kept the geodynamo active. Their work is published on 30 march 2016 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The Great Math Mystery
Join NOVA on a mathematical mystery tour - a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries.
Holy Shit! Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of Gravitational Waves
Since Albert Einstein first predicted their existence a century ago, physicists have been on the hunt for gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime.
That hunt is now over. Gravitational waves exist, and we've found them...
UMD Researchers Build a Smaller Device to Pick up Bigger Noises
Researchers, Radu Balan of the NWC, Justinian Rosca, of Siemens Corporate Technology, and Mark Lai (PhD, UMD), of UT Austin, build a smaller device
to pick up bigger noises.
"Imagine being able to stand in the middle of a loud party or an airport with hundreds of people, and selectively single out voices that you need to
analyze for security reasons. At the other extreme, imagine you are in a factory with many noisy machines running, and you can actually single out
the noise from a specific device you are interested in..."
Blooms: Strobe-Animated Sculptures
These are 3-D printed sculptures designed by John Edmark to animate when spun under a strobe light.
The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers.
The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns
137.5 degrees (the golden angle). If you count the number of spirals on any of these sculptures you will find
that they are always Fibonacci numbers.
More Fibonacci artwork by Edmark.
Multiple Authors Detection: A Quantitative Analysis of Dream of the Red Chamber
From the abstract "Inspired by the authorship controversy of Dream of the Red Chamber and the application of machine learning in the study of
literary stylometry, we develop a rigorous new method for the mathematical analysis of authorship by testing for a so-called chrono-divide in writing styles...
Applying our method to the Cheng-Gao version of Dream of the Red Chamber has led to convincing if not irrefutable evidence that the first 80 chapters and the
last 40 chapters of the book were written by two different authors."
Dream of the Red Chamber (wiki).
Overcoming Kerr-induced capacity limit in optical fiber transmission
Light-induced nonlinearities limit how much light can be pumped into optical fibers without compromising the signal. This limitation has led to the
prospect of a capacity crunch. Temprana et al. eliminated the effects of nonlinearity by using digital back-propagation methods with mutually coherent
laser pulses from a single frequency comb. Less technical
overview.
Discovery on Gaps in Primes
This past August, Tao and four other mathematicians proved an old Erdös conjecture, marking the first major advance in 76 years in understanding how far apart prime numbers can be.
Terrance Tao on Stephen Colbert
UCLA Professor Terrance Tao appeared on The Colbert Report in November to talk about sexy prime numbers.
Interview with Ingrid Daubechies A great interview with FFT2013 Distinguished Lecturer Dr. Ingrid Daubechies. She discusses her work in Harmonic Analysis, women in Mathematics, and improving Mathematics education in the developing international community.
Who is the man hiding in Picasso's Blue Room?
How multi-spectral imaging technology is used to uncover secrets in Picasso's masterpiece.
For those of you who still have World Cup Fever
The father of the World Cup hero, Mario Goetze, worked on wavelets.
In 1995 and '96, Mario's dad, Jurgen Goetze, was a postdoc researcher at Rice's electrical engineering department. While here, he co-authored papers such as "Approximate Moments and Regularity of Efficiently Implemented Orthogonal Wavelet Transforms" and "Parameterization of Orthonormal Wavelet Transforms and Their Implementation."
Downsampling is playing tricks on your eyes
A fun an interesting article from NPR. Your brain's natural downsampling and edge detection techniques can sometimes give some interesting results!
How signal processing can help find the missing Flight 370
CNN reports a story about how scientists are using freqency-shift and doppler effect analysis to help reveal the definitive path taken by the Malaysian Flight 370, whose disappearance has fascinated the nation.
The Evolution of SDM, a premier data mining conference
Now in its 14th year, the SIAM International Data Mining Conference has evolved into the second-largest data mining conference with 611 papers and an average 11 citations per paper since its inagural meeting in 2001.
David Donoho wins the 2013 Shaw Prize
David Donoho of Stanford University was awarded the 2013 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Donoho is a major contributer in the field of wavelets and compressed sensing.
Fantastic Article on the Work of Euler
A great article from the Bulletin of the AMS by Jefferey Lagarias (University of Michigan) entitled "Euler's Constant: Euler's Work and Modern Developments".
How to Fall in Love with Mathematics
Manil Suri (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) gives his opinion on how mathematics is about beautiful ideas and so much more than just "doing the math."
IBM's Watson Tries to Learn... Everything!
Another application of big data reduction: How can IBM's supercomputer extract knowledge from unstructured databases to do a number of tasks - from being victorious at trivia to diagnosing cancer.
The Existence of Mathematics
An entertaining discussion asking whether mathematics exists in the universe or if it is a fiction of human creation. Part of the PBS Idea Channel video series.
Followed by why Edward Frenkel (University of California Bekeley) says we should not listen to E. O. Wilson. [Slate 4/9/2013]
Sampling
This video explores what happens when a stream of water is exposed to an audio speaker producing a loud 24hz sine wave and video is captured of it at different frame rates. You can read more about sampling and the wagon-wheel effect at Wikipedia.
Exploiting Subtleties in the Uncertainty Principle Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory. [University of Rochester 3/3/2013][The paper in Nature Photonics]
Hyperspectral Imaging of Ancient Texts Discussion at the Library of Congress
Father Justin Sinaites, the librarian at St. Catherine’s Monastery, and Michael B. Toth, the program manager of the Sinai Palimpsest Project, will discuss how advanced hyperspectral imaging is revealing ancient texts in the library at St. Catherine’s, a remote Greek Orthodox monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert.
[11/19/2012]
Uncertainty Quantification 2012
"The Impact of C02 Sequestration on Shallow Groundwater" See the Siam News October 2012.
A Bandwidth Breakthrough
A dash of algebra on wireless networks promises to boost bandwidth tenfold, without new infrastructure.
Simple Harmonic (and non-harmonic) motion
Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion.
Stradivarius Violin Recreated By CAT Scan
Thinking outside of the box, a team of experts has used computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanning to recreate a 1704 violin known as "Betts." Steven Sirr, M.D., a radiologist at FirstLight Medical Systems in Mora, Minn. worked alongside professional violin makers John Waddle and Steve Rossow to unravel the mysteries of the famed violin without taking apart the original.
[Huffington Post 12/1/2011]
The Washington Post reports on an application of mathematics
The article (10/16/2011 Page E-5) describes a new exhibit, "Lost and Found: The Secrets
of Archimedes", at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, describing the
findings from the Archimedes Palimpsest. The research was centered at the
Walters.William Noel, Curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore, was the Keynote speaker at the 2010 February Fourier
Talks of the Norbert Wiener Center. He spoke on the discovery and
deciphering of the Archimedes text using multi-spectral imaging. This is a
fascinating application of mathematics and one of the specialties of the
Norbert Wiener Center. Also see The New York Times 10/17/2011, page C-7.
Yves Meyer wins Gauss Prize
Yves Meyer, Professor Emeritus at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France, has been selected for the 2010 Gauss Prize for fundamental contributions to number theory, operator theory and harmonic analysis, and his pivotal role in the development of wavelets and multiresolution analysis. The laudations by Ingrid Daubechies.
[International Congress of Mathematicians 8/20/10]
Hyperspectral
imaging reveals Jefferson changed "subjects" to "citizens" in Declaration
of Independence
Using a modified version of the kind of
spectral imaging technology developed for the military and for monitoring
agriculture, research scientists teased apart the mystery and reconstructed
the word that Jefferson banished in 1776... "It's almost like we
can see him write 'subjects' and then quickly decide that's not what he
wanted to say at all, that he didn't even want a record of it... Really,
it sends chills down the spine."
[Washington Post 07/03/10]
An Illustration of the Loss of Data Due to Repeated
Compressions
"Every time you upload... their video servers will re-encode it again.
Encoding the video means that it will be compressed, taking details out of
the image and audio, and producing artifacts. When you do this once, the details
and the artifacts are not noticeable.... The problem occurs when you go through
this process many times. The artifacts and lack of detail get fed again to
the compressor, which takes out even more details and introduces new glitches.
The second time you do it, you probably won't notice it. But every time this
process is repeated, more will go off.
"
[Gizmodo 06/04/10]
Using Laser to Map Ancient Civilization in a Matter of Days
"Signals, measured
and triangulated by GPS receivers and processed by computers, produced images
of the surface contours. This revealed distinct patterns of building ruins,
causeways and other human modifications of the landscape."
[NY Times
05/10/2010]
Loose
clicks sink ships
"Simply by analysing audio recordings of keyboard clatter, computer scientists
can now reconstruct an accurate transcript of what was typed—including
passwords."
[The
Economist 04/12/2010]
Finding order in the apparent chaos of
currents
"... With the aid of high-frequency radar that tracks the speed and
direction
of the flowing waters, and computers that rapidly perform millions of
calculations, the scientists found that a hidden skeleton guided whether
floating debris lingered or exited the bay...."
[NY
Times 09/28/2009]
Moonwalk
gets a makeover
"Forty years after the fact, some of the most historic moments of Apollo 11's
televised moonwalk have been brought into sharper focus using computerized
image processing techniques..."
[MSNBC
07/16/2009]
Uncovering
ancient secrets beneath the surface
"Scholars are reconsidering what ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes
knew of the concept of infinity, and archaeologists may have found a fossil
brain millions of years old, thanks to new ways of looking beneath the surface
of ancient objects. Using modern X-ray and spectral imaging, researchers
are uncovering two ancient manuscripts by Archimedes..." [AP
Wire via NBC 02/15/2009]
M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye
Elliptic Curves and M.C. Escher were probably never used in the same sentence until now. This 2002 SIAM news article explores how Escher used mathematics and how mathematics stumped the great artist.
