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 Uncertainty issues are paramount in the assessment of risks posed by natural hazards and in developing strategies to alleviate their consequences. http://phys.org/news286551644.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:40:53 EST news286551644 Kenneth Appel, a mathematician who was the first to use a computer to prove a century-old major mathematical theorem, has died at age 80 in Dover, N.H. http://phys.org/news286465938.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:30:01 EST news286465938 People have always yearned to see into the future, to peek around the corner and make sense of what's going on, according to author and mathematician David Orrell. But predicting the future is difficult. And what's more, the search for the "perfect model" of prediction often reveals as much about people's sense of aesthetics as it does about the future, Orrell said last Thursday during "Perfect Model: The Past, Present, and Future of Prediction," a talk sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. http://phys.org/news286179686.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:21:33 EST news286179686 Quiz: This beautiful mind was promoting game theory long before Cold War think tanks used mathematics to understand strategic maneuvering. Plotting, as a result, has never been the same. http://phys.org/news285946986.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:43:12 EST news285946986 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 Professor Mikko Alava and undergraduate Tuomo Hartonen of Aalto University Department of Applied Physics have modelled the work processes and human decision making in scientific peer review with the help of statistical physics. Their study will improve understanding of how actions of reviewers and editors during the review work correlate with the decisions to publish or reject article manuscripts. The article presenting their research is now published in the journal Scientific Reports. http://phys.org/news285831852.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:44:28 EST news285831852 (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 Computational models of the human heart can be very useful in studying not just the basic mechanisms of heart function, but also to analyze the heart in a diseased state, and come up with methods for diagnosis and therapy. http://phys.org/news284820499.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:48:46 EST news284820499 A couple of days ago on The Conversation, I set myself up with a task: to defend the usefulness of so-called "useless" maths. Today, that defence continues, with a look at the RSA algorithm. http://phys.org/news284806255.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:51:02 EST news284806255 I once made the mistake of asking a mathematician why he devoted his whole life to maths. "Because it's fun!" he replied wildly, his flabby cheeks beaming with childlike excitement. http://phys.org/news284806118.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:48:57 EST news284806118 (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 (Phys.org) —It looks like 2013 will be a thrilling season for baseball fans as four of the six divisions can be expected to deliver tight races, says baseball guru NJIT Associate Professor and Associate Dean Bruce Bukiet. Over the years, Bukiet has applied mathematical analysis to compute the number of regular season games each Major League Baseball team should win. Though his expertise is in mathematical modeling, his projections have compared well with those of so-called experts. http://phys.org/news283763671.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:30:02 EST news283763671 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 Flipping through a deck of cards in the library as her friends and classmates slough through books and papers means that, sometimes, people want answers from Carolyn Chen. http://phys.org/news283511697.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:15:04 EST news283511697 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 A team of Spanish and Argentinean researchers have verified that the distribution of the inhabitants in each Spanish province evolves in accordance with the maximum entropy principle in the field of physics. Therefore, this evolution is predictable. The results have allowed authors to put forward a 'socio-thermodynamic' theory that applies the laws of thermodynamics to collective human behaviour. http://phys.org/news282224775.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:46:37 EST news282224775 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 When a field-goal kicker lines up for an attempt in a football game, television viewers will typically be presented with the kicker's record from that distance—on all attempts from 40 to 49 yards, for instance. Meanwhile, if the kick in question is a crucial last-second attempt, the opposing coach will usually call a timeout, to "ice" the kicker—give him more time to feel the pressure, that is—while television announcers will often discuss the kicker's past performance in such "clutch" situations. http://phys.org/news281346552.html Other Sciences - Mathematics Fri, 01 Mar 2013 07:49:27 EST news281346552 (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