To humor mathematicians, picture a pile of sand grains – say, a billion – in one square of a vast sheet of graph paper. If four or more grains occupy a single square, that square topples by sending one grain to each of its ...
Mathematics
Mar 11, 2015
3
679
Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that's covered with tiny squares? It's the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a "periodic tiling of space", with shapes covering an entire area with no overlap ...
Mathematics
Aug 15, 2016
0
678
For many people, memories of maths lessons at school are anything but pretty. Yet "beautiful" is a word that I and other mathematicians often use to describe our subject. How on earth can maths be beautiful – and does it ...
Mathematics
Feb 20, 2017
1
1675
Researchers from the University of Oxford, the University of Limerick, and the Harvard School of Public Health have developed a mathematical model to examine online social networks, in particular the trade-off between copying ...
Mathematics
Jul 7, 2014
0
677
What if mathematicians could have seen COVID-19 coming, or could predict the next outbreak? Is it possible that numbers, manipulated by statistics, might warn of future market fluctuations and environmental disasters, or ...
Mathematics
Mar 5, 2021
1
676
Do batsmen put personal glory before their team? A study by QUT researchers found cricket batsmen who were close to reaching personal milestones were likely to alter their strategy in a way which, at first sight, seems detrimental ...
Mathematics
Feb 10, 2015
0
676
How do you make sure that light gets to the right place without loss of energy? To do that, lamps often use mirrors and lenses. But how do you adjust them properly to get the correct light output? Lotte Romijn investigated ...
Mathematics
Oct 19, 2021
0
676
Hugo Duminil-Copin, a French mathematician whose visual approach helped him win the world's most prestigious mathematics prize the Fields Medal on Tuesday, said he "doesn't really fit into the cliches of a genius".
Mathematics
Jul 5, 2022
2
675
Scientists of the Intelligent Logistics Centre at St Petersburg University have developed a new Case-Based Rate Reasoning (CBRR) model for predicting the dynamics of epidemics. Using this method, the researchers are preparing ...
Mathematics
Dec 9, 2020
1
675
Most of us know this phenomenon only too well: when it's hot outside, you feel the urge for a cooling ice cream. But would you have thought that mathematics could be involved?
Mathematics
Aug 9, 2019
0
1702
