MathGeek.com Blog

Star Trek’s Enterprise ship could be built in 20 years at a cost of $1 trillion

2012-05-18T12:49:00.001-07:00

Engineer: Star Trek’s Enterprise ship could be built in 20 years at a cost of $1 trillion | Technology News Blog - Yahoo! News: "Whether you're a Trekkie or not, you have to admit that there's some sense of wonder toexploring the stars and trying to find life on distant planets. Of course, the U.S.S. Enterprise is a fictional ship, but have you ever put in the thought as to what it would take to actually build it, and when we could get it done if we really put in the effort? The man behind the well-researched site buildtheenterprise.org has, and he's determined that a fully functional Enterprise is only 20 years away if we put in the effort. Created by a systems and electrical engineer with 30 years' experience, the BuildTheEnterprise site sets out a very specific timeline for the research and construction of such a massive space-related undertaking. The first nine years are dedicated to research, component testing, and drawing up a number of possible blueprints. The following 11 years are dedicated to development, where components will be manufactured and launched into space for assembly. On year 20, the ship would be ready for a 'moon fly by' with full crew and supplies. The plan may seem overly ambitious, but consider that we're already using a number of gadgets that were all but predicted by the Star Trek television series. The estimated cost of building the Enterprise: about $50 billion a year for the next 20 years — $1 trillion in total. That sounds like a lot of money (because it is), but considering that the United States spent nearly that much on the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bail out banks in 2008, putting a trillion towards making Star Trek a reality suddenly doesn't seem as ludicrous. Yeah, it's still pretty ludicrous, but in a really cool way."

Computing experts unveil superefficient ‘inexact’ chip

2012-05-18T07:41:00.001-07:00

Computing experts unveil superefficient ‘inexact’ chip: "Researchers have unveiled an ‘inexact’ computer chip that challenges the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy. The design improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors. Prototypes unveiled this week at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Cagliari, Italy, are at least 15 times more efficient than today’s technology.

The research, which earned best-paper honors at the conference, was conducted by experts from Rice University in Houston, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley.

In terms of speed, energy consumption and size, inexact computer chips like this prototype, are about 15 times more efficient than today's microchips. ‘It is exciting to see this technology in a working chip that we can measure and validate for the first time,’ said project leader Krishna Palem, who also serves as director of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID). ‘Our work since 2003 showed that significant gains were possible, and I am delighted that these working chips have met and even exceeded our expectations.’

ISAID is working in partnership with CSEM to create new technology that will allow next-generation inexact microchips to use a fraction of the electricity of today’s microprocessors.

‘The paper received the highest peer-review evaluation of all the Computing Frontiers submissions this year,’ said Paolo Faraboschi, the program co-chair of the ACM Computing Frontiers conference and a distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. ‘Research on approximate computation matches the forward-looking charter of Computing Frontiers well, and this work opens the door to interesting energy-efficiency opportunities of using inexact hardware together with traditional processing elements.’

The concept is deceptively simple: Slash power use by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes. By cleverly managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance."

Edsger Dijkstra

2012-05-09T13:24:00.001-07:00

“The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: If it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.”

Inside a mathematical proof lies literature

2012-05-07T12:35:00.001-07:00

Inside a mathematical proof lies literature, says Stanford's Reviel Netz: "Like novelists, mathematicians are creative authors. With diagrams, symbolism, metaphor, double entendre and elements of surprise, a good proof reads like a good story.

Reviel Netz, a professor of classics and, by courtesy, of philosophy, is especially interested in exploring the literary dimensions of the textual artifacts left by the likes of Archimedes and Euclid. Netz, one of the world's preeminent experts on the works of Archimedes, sees proofs as narratives that lead the reader turn by turn through an unfolding story that ends with a mathematical solution.

In his book Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic, Netz reveals the stunning stylistic similarities between Hellenistic poetry and mathematical texts from the same era."

Leonard Nimoy set to beam up for Star Trek sequel

2012-05-02T16:02:00.001-07:00

Leonard Nimoy set to beam up for Star Trek sequel | Celebrity Buzz | a Chron.com blog: "Leonard Nimoy is set to come out of retirement to reprise his Spock role in the new Star Trek blockbuster.

The 2009 sci-fi reboot cast younger actors as the series’ famed characters, with Zachary Quinto stepping into the role of Spock. Nimoy still featured in the hit movie as an older version of the character, but he announced in 2010 he was retiring from acting and was happy to let Quinto take the reins of his iconic hero.

But new U.S. reports have indicated that he will star in the sequel to the reboot."

A Giant Leap for Richard Nixon - WSJ.com

2012-05-02T04:36:00.001-07:00

A Giant Leap for Richard Nixon - WSJ.com: "Imagine if President Nixon had decided to base his 1972 re-election campaign on the boast that he landed on the moon. His predecessors tried and failed for eight years. It wasn't an easy decision--what if something went wrong? But that's why you hire a president, to make those gutsy calls. Which path would George McGovern have taken?

That's analogous to President Obama's effort to campaign on the killing of Osama bin Laden. His absurd braggadocio is turning one of the few successes to occur under his leadership into a political liability."

Moore’s Law ends in 10 years, physicist claims

2012-04-30T16:00:00.001-07:00

Moore’s Law ends in 10 years, physicist claims | Fox News: "Transistors inside new Intel CPUs unveiled last week are hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, thanks to a 22-nanometer manufacturing process that the company says ‘fuels Moore’s Law for years to come.’

Not everyone agrees.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes instead that an end to Moore’s famous theory is -- at last -- in sight.

'In about 10 years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore’s Law,' said Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York (CUNY)."

First-ever image of a flat torus in 3D

2012-04-26T12:08:00.001-07:00

Mathematics: First-ever image of a flat torus in 3D: "Just as a terrestrial globe cannot be flattened without distorting the distances, it seemed impossible to visualize abstract mathematical objects called flat tori in ordinary three-dimensional space. However, a French team of mathematicians and computer scientists has succeeded in constructing and visually representing an image of a flat torus in three-dimensional space. This is a smooth fractal, halfway between fractals and ordinary surfaces. The results are published in PNAS."

Mathematicians say magnetic fields can send particles to infinity

2012-04-17T15:12:00.001-07:00

Mathematicians say magnetic fields can send particles to infinity | R&D Mag: "Researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain) have mathematically shown that particles charged in a magnetic field can escape into infinity without ever stopping. One of the conditions is that the field is generated by current loops situated on the same plane. At the moment this is a theoretical mathematical study, but two researchers from UCM have recently proved that, in certain conditions, magnetic fields can send particles to infinity, according to the study published in the journal Quarterly of Applied Mathematics. "If a particle 'escapes' to infinity it means two things: that it will never stop, and "something else", Antonio Diaz-Cano, one of the authors, explained to SINC. Regarding the first, the particle can never stop, but it can be trapped, doing circles forever around a point, never leaving an enclosed space. However, the "something else" goes beyond the established limits. "If we imagine a spherical surface with a large radius, the particle will cross the surface going away from it, however big the radius may be" the researcher declares."

Man Uses Physics to Fight $400 Traffic Ticket

2012-04-16T04:56:00.001-07:00

Man Uses Physics to Fight $400 Traffic Ticket | NBC San Diego: "A UCSD physicist used his knowledge and a little creativity to get himself out of a $400 traffic ticket.

Dmirti Krioukov was issued a traffic ticket for failing to completely stop at a stop sign. Instead of paying the ticket or going to traffic school, the physicist fought the citation by writing a four-page paper explaining how the ticket he was given defies physics.

Using his knowledge of angular and linear motion, Krioukov prepared a paper for the judge in his case and was able to argue – and prove – his innocence.

The paper explained how what the officer “thought” he saw, he didn’t really see, according to the laws of physics.

“Therefore my argument in the court went as follows: that what he saw would be easily confused by the angle of speed of this hypothetical object that failed to stop at the stop sign. And therefore, what he saw did not properly reflect reality, which was completely different," said Krioukov.

Before others try the “physics defense” in before a judge, Krioukov warned that it took a perfect combination of events for his argument to legitimately hold up.

By the way, when asked if he really did stop at the stop sign, the physicist stuck to his argument.

“Of course I did,” he said with a smile."

New IBM App Presents Nearly 1,000 Years of Math History

2012-04-06T07:58:00.001-07:00

New IBM App Presents Nearly 1,000 Years of Math History | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: "Math nerds and historians, it’s time to get excited. Minds of Modern Mathematics, a new iPad app released Thursday by IBM, presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960.

The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long “Men of Modern Mathematics” installation created in 1964 by Charles and Ray Eames. Minds of Modern Mathematics users can view a digitized version of the original infographic as well as browse through an interactive timeline with more than 500 biographies, math milestones, and images of relevant artifacts.

IBM hopes that classes and students will use the app, provoking more people to pursue math, science, or technology-related educations and jobs.

“Careers of the future will rely heavily on creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration — all themes that were core to the ‘Minds of Modern Mathematics’ movement and remain equally relevant today,” Chid Apte, IBM Director of analytics Research and Mathematical Sciences said in a press release. “What better way than a mobile app to reintroduce this timeless classic to inspire a new generation of learners?”

Starting from the first French pope to celebrated mathematician John von Neumann, users can see every major math-related event or person in a visually impressive layout. You can tap on an entry to read more about it, and view how math events and math superstars relate in time to other historical events, such as the First Crusade that seizes Jerusalem and the signing of The Declaration of Independence."

Counting on mathematics, now more than ever

2012-04-02T05:05:00.001-07:00

Counting on mathematics, now more than ever — Opinion — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine: "Recently, someone asked me how many of the following four names I recognized: Jeremy Linn, Andrei Markov, Meryl Streep and Isaac Schoenberg, and I’d like to pose the same question to you.

My guess is you will recognize two of the four. Actually, the quiz is a fraud. It’s just my awkward way of announcing that April is National Mathematics Awareness Month and to make a basic point that although mathematics never makes headlines like an NBA star or winning an Oscar, it might play a more important role in our daily lives, and that’s where the two unrecognizable names on the list come in.

Andrei Markov was a Russian mathematician who in 1906 worked out a mathematical theory, called Markov Chains, for describing how many physical systems evolve over time. Such a system might be anything from a baseball game, a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, the evolution of a biological population of bacteria or even a person surfing the Internet, clicking from one Web page to another."

Does "Touch" Get the Math Right?

2012-03-26T09:41:00.001-07:00

Dr. Keith Devlin: Does Touch Get the Math Right?: "The new Fox TV series Touch, starring Kiefer Sutherland, has as one of its central characters a mathematically gifted, autistic, 11-year-old child Jake, played by David Mazouz. How accurate is the portrayal of mathematics in the show? Based on the first episode, the answer is, "Not very." (The caveat is, it doesn't really matter.)

The first number we encounter, by way of Jake's disembodied voice (he does not speak, so we only hear him as a thought-track) is the golden ratio, approximately 1.618. Thematically, that's good, since that number does occur a lot in nature, often by way of its closely associated Fibonacci sequence. Which makes it all the more perplexing that, midway through the first episode, we have Danny Glover's character repeating a series of oft-recycled falsehoods about the Fibonacci sequence.

He begins by saying that it was discovered by the twelfth-century mathematician Fibonacci, which is not true. Fibonacci (who was in fact a thirteenth-century mathematician, and who was not given that nickname until the 19th century) simply included in a book he wrote, an ancient arithmetic problem that yields those numbers when you solve it. There is no evidence that he ever investigated the sequence. Besides, most of the sequence's interesting mathematical properties and its connections to the natural world were not discovered until many centuries later.

Though there are many fascinating examples of the occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, the three that Glover cites are all wrong: that the sequence can be found in the curve of a wave, in the spiral of a shell, and in the segments of a pineapple."

The Mathematics of Jury Size

2012-03-26T04:49:00.001-07:00

The Mathematics of Jury Size | News Service - ISNS: "Could different jury sizes improve the quality of justice? The answers are not clear, but mathematicians are analyzing juries to identify potential improvements.

Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say that juries in criminal cases must include 12 people, or that their decisions must be unanimous. In fact, some states use juries of different sizes.

One primary reason why today's juries tend to have 12 people is that the Welsh king Morgan of Gla-Morgan, who established jury trials in 725 A.D., decided upon the number, linking the judge and jury to Jesus and his Twelve Apostles."

On the hunt for mathematical beauty

2012-03-23T04:36:00.001-07:00

On the hunt for mathematical beauty - MIT News Office: "“Imagine an airplane in which each row has one seat, and there are 100 seats,” Borodin says. “People line up in random order to fill the plane, and each person has a carry-on suitcase in their hand, which it takes them one minute to put into the overhead compartment.”

If the passengers all board the plane in an orderly fashion, starting from the rear seats and working their way forwards, it would be a very quick process, Borodin says. But in reality, people queue up in a random order, significantly slowing things down.

So how long would it take to board the aircraft? “It’s not an easy problem to solve, but it is possible,” Borodin says. “It turns out that it is approximately equal to twice the square root of the number of people in the queue.” So with a 100-seat airplane, boarding would take 20 minutes, he says."

Hazudra Fodder: Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool.

2012-03-20T15:00:00.001-07:00

Hazudra Fodder: Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool.: "Why use MATLAB? Don't be a fool. I'll get right to the point, it's beyond me as to why anyone (businesses, educational institutions, individuals) would want to use MATLAB except for very specialized purposes. GNU Octave has almost identical syntax and is FREE. Let's compare them:"

Why Mathematica is Better Than Matlab

2012-03-19T05:58:00.001-07:00

Wolfram General Mathematica Training Course: A Speed Date: "This course provides a whirlwind tour of Mathematica showing how decades of research in computation, language, and development together with well-thought-out design principles and solid software engineering have guided us in creating a modern computing platform. Key features, including dynamic interactivity, natural language input, and numerical/symbolic computation, as well as applications in image processing, control systems, GPU computation, and more, will be explored."

Comparing Matlab and Mathematica

2012-03-15T16:11:00.001-07:00

Comparing Matlab and Mathematica - by walkiria - Helium: "The comparison between Matlab and Mathematica is NOT numeric versus symbolic as some claim. It is 'high level complete system' versus 'low level core with specialist toolboxes'. Mathematica can do all the numeric math and matrix work that Matlab can do, as fast and as accurately. Matlab is almost strictly a subset of the functionality of Mathematica."

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur

2012-03-15T14:48:00.001-07:00

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur -- Daily Intel: "It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported: Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership. "One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore." "He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said. Burn. We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling. "I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there." Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed. She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'" In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there.""

Abandon MATLAB

2012-03-15T04:54:00.001-07:00

Why write this? « Abandon MATLAB: "Well, MATLAB was obviously an improvement over FORTRAN for working scientists and engineers, in much the same way that Perl was an improvement over Sed, Awk and shell. So MATLAB was pretty good, in the ’90s, I suppose. Today, it’s an ancient language..."

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet

2012-03-13T08:01:00.001-07:00

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet: "Summary: Windows 8 is a massive gamble for Microsoft, and right now I can see the potential for it to fail harder than Windows Vista did.

I’ve been using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview since its release back at the end of February, and having used it extensively on a number of several physical and virtual systems, I can now put my finger on what I think is wrong with Microsoft’s latest incarnation of Windows."

The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010

2012-03-12T12:35:00.001-07:00

No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010: "The Tau Manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice for the circle constant is π—but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article “π Is Wrong!”1, π is wrong. It’s time to set things right."

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard

2012-03-09T09:54:00.001-08:00

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard: "You may have have thought that games like Mario, Donkey Kong and so on were hard at the time you were playing them, but you probably didn't guess that they were NP-hard. NP-hard problems are in a sense the ones that are most difficult to solve by computational means because the time it takes to find a solution tends to increase so quickly with the size of the problem that it just isn't practical to perform the computation. Now we have some results from computer scientists at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that many classic games contain within them an NP-hard problem. It is a bit like the discovery of a black hole at the center of every galaxy. Should either fact be surprising?"

Pi Goes to Washington

2012-03-09T08:35:00.001-08:00

TeachPi.org: "Only 112 years after its last appearance on a legislative floor—the doomed bill in the Indiana statehouse that offered nine different values for the number—Pi made a surprise appearance in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009.

March 14 fell on a Saturday in 2009, but that didn‘t stop things from heating up in the week leading up to it. On Monday, March 8th, Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee introduced House Resolution 224, officially called “Supporting the designation of Pi Day, and for other purposes.” As the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Gordon’s intent was clear: to use the holiday as a platform for making a statement about the importance of math and science education in America."

Why we have leap days | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

2012-02-29T13:19:00.001-08:00

Why we have leap days | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: "We have two basic units of time: the day and the year. Of all the everyday measurements we use, these are the only two based on concrete physical events: the time it takes for the Earth to spin once on its axis, and the time it takes to go around the Sun. Every other unit of time we use (second, hour, week, month) is rather arbitrary. They’re convenient, but not based on independent, non-arbitrary events."