Mathematics

Magazine articles on mathematics.

Old Articles: <Older 221-230 Newer>

Science News November 12, 2005 Ivars Peterson	Ranking College Football Teams If you aren't happy with where your team stands in the national rankings, two scientists have developed a novel ranking scheme based on the mathematics of networks.
Science News November 5, 2005 Ivars Peterson	Climbing a Watery Slope Research by mathematicians involving the meniscus-climbing actions of water-walking insects sheds new light on fluid dynamics.
Financial Planning November 1, 2005 Craig L. Israelsen	Ways of Means Committee There's a critical difference between arithmetic and geometric means when calculating average annualized return. As the standard deviation (or volatility) of annual returns increases, the arithmetic mean grows larger than (and therefore, further away from) the correct geometric mean.
Science News October 29, 2005 Ivars Peterson	Ask-a-Friend Marketplaces How much incentive is required for a member of a social network to have a reasonable probability of extracting an answer to a query from the network? Here's the mathematical response.
Science News October 22, 2005	Misleading Numbers The "Number Watch" Web site focuses on "misleading" numbers that appear in the media and are often used to promote specific causes.
Science News October 1, 2005 Ivars Peterson	Numbers of No Escape Why do such mathemagical black holes occur? In general, processes that turn large inputs into significantly smaller outputs can quickly reduce even an infinite universe of starting points to a manageable, finite set of cases.
Science News September 24, 2005	Math Music An interactive Web site, developed at Eastern Washington University, provides variety of tools for composing music based on mathematical recipes that convert sequences of numbers -- such as pi, or Fibonacci numbers -- into sounds.
Bio-IT World September 2005 Stephen Langdell	Data Mining and the Euredit Project The multimillion-dollar, EU-funded research project on statistical methods for data mining, is creating interesting possibilities for many bioinformatics endeavors, including microarray analysis and forecasting trends.
Technology Research News September 19, 2005	Two Schools of Cryptography Hard numbers vs. uncertainty: Computationally secure methods use cryptographic keys that are answers to difficult-to-solve mathematical problems. Probabilistically secure methods use cryptographic keys chosen at random from a fast source of random signals.
Science News September 17, 2005 Ivars Peterson	A Mathemusical Potpourri Are you curious about the sound of pi? What sort of tune is the Dow Jones Industrial Average singing today? How does redwood DNA translate into an environmental symphony? A new computer program and Web site allows you to find out.
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