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Science News March 29, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Crediting Basketball's Three-Pointers The adoption of the three-point field goal in basketball changed the game. Now, statistician Thomas P. Ryan asks how best to credit three-point field goals so that the resulting numbers say something useful about how a game was played. |
Industrial Physicist Feb/Mar 2003 Theodore Modis |
Business: A scientific approach to managing competition The Volterra-Lotka predator-prey model has opened the way to effectively managing competition in the marketplace. A set of elementary marketing actions has emerged that provide guidance when searching for a commercial image or an effective advertising message. |
Science News March 15, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Solving Yahtzee Phil Woodward of Pfizer Global Research and Development in England has solved the game of Yahtzee, computing all of the more than 1 trillion possible outcomes and working out optimal playing strategies. His results appear in the current issue of Chance. |
Science News March 8, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Contra Dances, Matrices, and Groups The music for contra dancing is highly structured, and the dancing itself is equally structured. Here's a look at the mathematics of contra dancing. |
Science News March 1, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Cracking Fermat Numbers Fermat numbers have what mathematicians sometimes describe as a "beautiful mathematical form," involving powers of 2. They were of interest 400 years ago and are now the subject of a wide-ranging worldwide computer search. |
Science News February 22, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
The Tangled Task of Distinguishing Knots Unlike a knotted piece of rope, a mathematical knot has no free ends. In this context, a knot is a one-dimensional curve that winds through itself in three-dimensional space, finally catching its tail to form a closed loop. |
Science News February 8, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
A Graceful Sculpture's Showy Snow Crash Brent Collins has spent more than two decades carving gracefully curvaceous sculptures out of wood. Collins is not a mathematician, yet his intuition and aesthetic sense have led him to explore patterns and shapes that have an underlying mathematical logic. |
Science News February 1, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Sliding-Coin Puzzles Geometric arrangements of coins can serve as the basis for all sorts of puzzles. |
Science News January 25, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
Chemical Dissections In recreational mathematics, a geometric dissection involves cutting a geometric figure into pieces that you can reassemble into another figure. Now, chemists have gotten into the dissection game, as a novel strategy for getting small objects to assemble themselves into different regular forms. |
Science News January 18, 2003 Ivars Peterson |
A Perfect Collaboration Together, Euclid of Alexandria (c325-c265 BC) and Leonard Euler (1707-1783), born in Switzerland and at various times resident in St. Petersburg and Berlin, collaborated on proving an interesting result in number theory -- without the benefit of e-mail or time travel. |
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