http://phys.org/science-news/mathematics/ en-us Phys.Org provides the latest news on mathematics, math, math science, mathematical science and math technology. Differences divide us. Human society fractures along lines defined by politics, religion, ethnicity, and perhaps most fundamentally, language. Although these differences contribute to the great variety of human lives, the partitions they create can lead to conflict and strife, impeding efforts toward social justice and economic development. http://phys.org/news287998344.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 17 May 2013 08:32:49 EST news287998344 The answer is yes, according to a paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. In a paper published in the journal last month, authors Anthony Bonato, Dieter Mitsche, and Pawel Pralat describe a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, such as a terrorist organization, using minimal resources. http://phys.org/news287931705.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 16 May 2013 14:02:41 EST news287931705 (Phys.org) —Mathematician Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire, appears to have taken a major step in solving the twin prime conjecture. He's come up with a mathematical proof that shows that the number of pairs of prime numbers that exist that are less than 70 million units apart is infinite. His proof is currently under review for publication in the journal Annals of Mathematics. http://phys.org/news287828042.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 15 May 2013 09:14:19 EST news287828042 Bubble baths and soapy dishwater, the refreshing head on a beer and the luscious froth on a cappuccino. All are foams, beautiful yet ephemeral as the bubbles pop one by one. http://phys.org/news287313104.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 09 May 2013 14:00:08 EST news287313104 Two Spanish scientists have designed an equation that provides a highly accurate estimate of an individual's speed based on stride length. They used data from professional athletes and walking and running experiments on a beach in order to come up with the equation. The result has applications in the study of fossil trackways of human footprints. http://phys.org/news285844594.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:16:56 EST news285844594 (Phys.org)—If you were to wander the halls of a courthouse during a murder trail, could you predict the verdict from the conversations you would overhear? And what would be the smallest amount of information you would require to make that prediction? http://phys.org/news285405381.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:16:27 EST news285405381 (Phys.org) —A new mathematical analysis of Twitter messages has shown that happiness indicators increase logarithmically with distance from home, and that people who move around more are likely to be happier than those who stay close to home. http://phys.org/news284962091.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:08:38 EST news284962091 (Phys.org) —Charles Radin a mathematical physicist with the University of Texas and one of his former student's David Aristoff, have built a 2D model material made of disks to represent atoms. In their article published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, they suggest that their model shows that defining the difference between a solid and a liquid should be more a matter of measuring the way a material responds to shear, than looking at the way its atoms are arranged. http://phys.org/news284629586.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:46:40 EST news284629586 (Phys.org) —Ants have long been known to choose the shortest of several routes to a food source, but what happens when the shortest route is not the fastest? This situation can occur, for example, when ants are forced to travel on two different surfaces, where they can walk faster on one surface than on the other. In a new study, scientists have found that ants behave the same way as light does when traveling through different media: both paths obey Fermat's principle of least time, taking the fastest route rather than the most direct one. Besides revealing insight into ant communities, the findings could offer inspiration to researchers working on solving complex problems in robotics, logistics, and information technology. http://phys.org/news284034410.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:27:52 EST news284034410 Mathematical models can be used to study the spread of technological innovations among individuals connected to each other by a network of peer-to-peer influences, such as in a physical community or neighborhood. One such model was introduced in a paper published yesterday in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems. http://phys.org/news283618408.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:54:27 EST news283618408 Researchers have developed sophisticated numerical simulations of a butterfly's forward flight. http://phys.org/news283433498.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:31:53 EST news283433498 When Georgia Tech opens the doors to the Georgia Dome next month as the host institution for the 2013 Final Four, expect third-seeded Florida to walk out as the national champion. That's the prediction from Georgia Tech's Logistic Regression/Markov Chain (LRMC) college basketball ranking system, a computerized model that has chosen the men's basketball national champ in three of the last five years. http://phys.org/news283006027.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:47:15 EST news283006027 Belgian-born Pierre Deligne has won this year's $1-million Abel Prize in mathematics for his contributions to algebraic geometry and their "transformative impact on number theory, representation theory and related fields." http://phys.org/news282989131.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:05:55 EST news282989131 For many of us, maple syrup is an essential part of breakfast—a staple accompaniment to pancakes and waffles—but rarely do we think about the complicated and little-understood physiological aspects of syrup production. Each spring, maple growers in temperate regions around the world collect sap from sugar maple trees, which is one of the first steps in producing this delicious condiment. http://phys.org/news281876730.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:05:48 EST news281876730 (Phys.org) —A small team of computer scientists from Taiwan, the U.S. and China has developed an algorithm that aids a desire to manipulate an unknown social network user into accepting a friend request. The idea, as they describe in their paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, is to offer intelligent suggestions of other people to friend to create a mutual social circle of friends, which will increase the odds of the ultimate target agreeing to a friend request. http://phys.org/news281779082.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:58:19 EST news281779082 Fermat's Last Theorem—the idea that a certain simple equation had no solutions— went unsolved for nearly 350 years until Oxford mathematician Andrew Wiles created a proof in 1995. Now, Case Western Reserve University's Colin McLarty has shown the theorem can be proved more simply. http://phys.org/news281614177.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:10:45 EST news281614177 (Phys.org)—When physics graduate student Jesse Silverberg took his girlfriend to a heavy metal concert, he didn't dive into the mosh pit as usual. He hung back and observed that humans act like particles, dancing into "collective motion"—from which models could provide insight into panicked crowds. http://phys.org/news281182093.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:08:28 EST news281182093 (Phys.org)—Whether cellular calls, texting, instant messaging, there's more to communications than content: every exchange leaves behind an electronic trace that can be measured and studied. Recently, researchers led by Prof. Wei-Xing Zhou at East China University of Science and Technology and by Prof. H. Eugene Stanley at University of Boston studied intercall durations of the 100,000 most active cell phone users of a Chinese mobile phone operator. They found that these durations form three clusters – robot-based callers, telecom fraud and telephone sales – that follow a power-law distribution, but also found that calling patterns of individual users formed a fourth cluster that followed a Weibull distribution. The researchers conclude that their findings may enable a more detailed analysis of the huge body of data contained in the logs of massive numbers of users. http://phys.org/news280477747.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:00:02 EST news280477747 Using a grown-up version of the rock-paper-scissors game, Indiana University cognitive scientists offer a new theory of the group dynamics that arise in situations as varied as cycles of fashion, fluctuations of financial markets, eBay bidding wars and political campaign strategies. http://phys.org/news280513619.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:28:25 EST news280513619 (Phys.org)—Social groups in a population can lend important cues to law enforcement officials, consumer-based services and risk assessors. Social and geographical patterns that provide information about such communities or gangs have been a popular subject for mathematical modeling. http://phys.org/news280071114.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:32:15 EST news280071114 (Phys.org)—Curtis Cooper, professor of math and computer science at the University of Central Missouri, has discovered the largest prime number to date, it's 257,885,161 – 1. It has 17 million digits and is also a Mersenne prime (a prime number defined by the equation N=2n-1, where N and n are both prime numbers). The find was part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project that uses a distributed approach to number crunching using volunteer computers. http://phys.org/news279365582.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:33:24 EST news279365582 (Phys.org)—Crime can happen anywhere, but it usually doesn't. Researchers have noticed that criminal activity seems to be concentrated in self-perpetuating hotspots. Crime leads to more crime. Then, from these epicenters, crime spreads outward through the community. http://phys.org/news279185144.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:25:54 EST news279185144 (Phys.org)—J. M. J. van Leeuwen, a physicist at Leiden University in The Netherlands has created a mathematical model that predicts the maximum incremental size of falling dominos. He's found, as he describes in a paper he's uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that in a perfect world, the maximum growth factor is approximately 2. http://phys.org/news277110291.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 11 Jan 2013 07:30:06 EST news277110291 If you have ever wondered why you never seem to win at skill-based games such as poker or chess, there might be a very good reason. Writing in PNAS, a University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. http://phys.org/news276774454.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:00:09 EST news276774454 (Phys.org)—December 22 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician renowned for somehow intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without the use of proofs or modern mathematical tools. A devout Hindu, Ramanujan said that his findings were divine, revealed to him in dreams by the goddess Namagiri. http://phys.org/news274941179.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:33:08 EST news274941179 Mathematics has provided an answer for those striving for the perfect Christmas tree, Britain's University of Sheffield says. http://phys.org/news274004553.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:22:49 EST news274004553 Penguins that face the bitter cold and icy winds of Antarctica often huddle together in large groups for warmth during storms. Mathematicians at the University of California, Merced created a model of penguin huddles that assumes each penguin aims solely to minimize its own heat loss. Surprisingly, the model reveals that such self-centered behavior results in an equitable sharing of heat. The results are published in the online journal PLOS ONE and the researchers will discuss their findings at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), held Nov. 18 – 20 in San Diego, Calif. http://phys.org/news272316811.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:33:40 EST news272316811 What started out as a project to teach undergraduate students about network analysis, turned into an in-depth study of whether it was possible to analyze a National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball team's strategic interactions as a network. Arizona State University researchers discovered it is possible to quantify both a team's cohesion and communication structure. http://phys.org/news272301334.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:15:53 EST news272301334 Lead researcher Dr Tie-Qiao Tang said while modelling had previously been done on factors such as luggage congestion, routing, and takeoff runway scheduling, his study was the first to look at boarding. http://phys.org/news272011395.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:46:00 EST news272011395 For the kinds of animals that are most familiar to us—ones that are big enough to see—it's a no-brainer: Is it better to sit around and wait for food to come to you, or to move around and find it? Larger animals that opt to sit around aren't likely to last long. http://phys.org/news270996811.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:00:06 EST news270996811