Math Model May Speed Healing of Chronic Wounds

Victims of permanent, sometimes fatal wounds may receive hope from a new mathematical model published by researchers at Ohio State University.

Ischemic wounds, which arise from conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure, heal extremely slowly―if at all―and may result in loss of limb or even death. Inadequate blood supply in the affected area decreases the amount of oxygen and proteins that reaches the lesions, essential components of the healing process.

The model, a system of partial differential equations, uses some data from animal studies, but also includes values the researchers assigned to the various cells and chemicals in wound healing. Chuan Xue, a postdoctoral researcher in Ohio State's Mathematical Biosciences Institute, helped the team calculate numerical coefficients for oxygen concentration, the concentration of growth factors, density of white blood cells, density of fibroblasts, and density of tips and sprouts of new blood vessels.

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For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics

For today’s mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children’s magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.

Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared “activity features” and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner’s was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.

At that point, Mr. Gardner was 42 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on “recreational mathematics,” a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.

He quit his job with Humpty Dumpty.

On Wednesday, Mr. Gardner will celebrate his 95th birthday with the publication of another book — his second book of essays and mathematical puzzles to be published just this year. With more than 70 books to his name, he is the world’s best-known recreational mathematician, and has probably introduced more people to the joys of math than anyone in history.

How is this possible?

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Emotional Bunny says: "OMG! I finished his book before I was 15, and I never knew! I thought for sure he had majored in math or something similar, but alas it appears he majored in philosophy....."

The Al Gore Rhythm

Here is a really interesting trick to multiplying large numbers in your head, and quickly.....

"Here’s the “mystery algorithm” for 26 * 31, or any other set of two-digit numbers. Keep in mind that the description is much longer than the problem should take. After a little practice, it should take no longer than 10 seconds to do a problem like this in your head."

Read the method here

"....One more thing. Although this method beats the pickles out most methods, doing something as simple as 26 x 31 only requires that you multiply 26 by 3 in your head (any 3rd grader should really be able to do that, if we didn’t treat them like simps), stick a 0 at the end. That’s 780. Mentally add 26 to that, and Bob’s your uncle." MY SIDE NOTE: To use this trick when the second number (31) has a ones digit greater than one (say 37, rather than 31), simply multiply 26 by the ones digit number (7), and then add that number to your original 780. ;)

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Math + Comics = Logicomix!

The global success of Logicomix, a new graphic novel from Greece, wouldn't seem so unusual if it weren't for the comic book's unlikely subject matter: logic and mathematics.

Originally published in Greek in the fall of 2008, the math comic book "Logicomix" was a hit at home, but its authors were unprepared for the reception in the United States and Britain, where it sold out on the first day of its release in September.

Mathematics theory hardly sounds like a fitting theme for a comic book, but a new graphic novel from Greece about math in early 20th century Europe has become an unlikely hit, topping bestseller lists in the United States and Britain.

"Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth" follows British philosopher, logician and pacifist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in his tortuous quest for the foundations of mathematics, and his search for logic as a shield from the insanity that consumed other members of his family.

The story uses his relationships with the great thinkers and mathematicians of the era, two of his four marriages and historical events in Europe such as the rise of Nazism as a backdrop for the novel's more abstract and philosophical subject matter.

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Discovery Overturns Long-held Theory About Our Biological Clocks

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — University of Michigan mathematicians and their British colleagues say they have identified the signal that the brain sends to the rest of the body to control biological rhythms, a finding that overturns a long-held theory about our internal clock.

...For decades, researchers have believed that it is the rate at which SCN cells fire electrical pulses---fast during the day and slow at night---that controls time-keeping throughout the body, much like a metronome.

That's the idea that has prevailed for more than two decades. But new evidence compiled by Forger and his colleagues shows that "the old model is, frankly, wrong," Forger said.

The true signaling mechanism is very different: The timing signal sent from the SCN is encoded in a complex firing pattern that had previously been overlooked, the researchers concluded...

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Using art to illuminate math

Cos Cob School art teacher Susan Striker has always considered herself "math phobic."

As a grade-school student, Striker hated having to go to math class, detested the homework and dreaded the quizzes. And as an art teacher, math has long been among the furthest topics from her mind.

So when Cos Cob's principal, Kimberly Beck, recently handed her a copy of the school's math curriculum and pointed out how much it overlapped with her art lessons, Striker was at first incredulous.

....The focal point of that project is a new art display in the school's second-floor hallway where Striker has posted prints of favorite artworks alongside banners that hail the mathematical concept each illustrates.

For instance, an Andy Warhol painting of the pop artist's image reproduced in various color schemes on a calendar-like grid illustrates the concept of an "array," which is used at the school to teach to multiplication and division.

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SPECIAL! More Art-to-Math articles here:

ART+MATH=X

Scientists make music into mathematical shapes

(Image credits: math.zju.edu.cn)

Shuffling Math

Using math, a magician can figure out how to find one card in a deck or how many times to shuffle the deck to really mix it up.

....It all got started when Bayer saw Diaconis perform a magic trick. Diaconis started with a deck of cards with each suit in perfect order, ace through king. He handed the deck to someone in the audience. Cut and shuffle the deck three times, he said, and then look at the top card without showing anyone.

“I’m sure you’ll agree that no living human could know the value of that card,” Diaconis declared grandly.

Then Diaconis asked the audience member to insert that card anywhere in the deck and cut and shuffle it a final time.

Finally, he spread the cards face up in a wide arc on the table, stared for several long moments, and plucked out the right card.

“How did you do it?” Bayer asked in amazement.

Diaconis winked at Bayer and, since he was a friend, explained how it worked – once the two were alone. Diaconis put the deck in order again and cut the deck and shuffled the cards once. Then he spread the cards out on the table, face up.

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Who Knew Foreign Affairs Required So Much Math?

Monday, October 5, 2009

Do your eyes glaze over when foreign policy wonks start talking about the "six-party" talks, the G-7 plus one, the 26 plus nine? (Okay, we made the last one up.)

Sometimes the numbers make obvious sense. For example, the "two plus four" talks on German reunification two decades ago were straightforward enough. That stood for East and West Germany plus the four post-World War II occupying powers -- the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

Other numerals are trickier. Take the Group of Six. That was set up in 1975 as a club for the six richest countries in the world: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the United States. Canada joined a year later, so it became the G-7. It stayed that way for the next two decades until the Russians, long a lowly "plus one," were finally allowed in, so the G-7 begat the G-8.

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(Image credit: topnews.in)

Using Pigeons to Teach Math

Published: October 01, 2009 by Jennifer Jacob Brown
When you think of classroom learning tools, your mind likely conjures up images of textbooks, rulers, and microscopes. But fourth-graders at Poplar Springs Elementary are learning important skills using something a bit more unconventional — their own flock of pigeons.

...This year, McDonald teaches fourth grade at PSE, and says the pigeons — dubbed the Poplar Springs Flying Pandas — have not only provided her with opportunities to teach lessons in every subjects, but have made her students excited to learn those lessons.

The pigeons have given the kids an opportunity to learn math by measuring food and calculating flight speed, to learn geography by using a map to make charts of where pigeons might fly, to learn writing by composing stories and letters about the birds, and to learn science in a huge variety of ways.

They make graphs, research pigeons and pigeon breeding, and learn about animal instincts and care. They even learned about the food chain after an unfortunate incident in which a pigeon was taken by a neighborhood hawk.

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(Image credit: godbitesman.com)

Egyptian Number System

The Egyptian numeration system evolved around 3400 BCE. It uses special symbols to represent numbers that are power of 10

Notice that for number greater than 10, this numeration system will require fewer symbols than the Tally numeration system.

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Supermathematics Is Behind the 1000 MPH Car

September 24, 2009

Called the Bloodhound project, it aims to take a car to a velocity of 1,000 miles per hour. Computational scientist Ben Evans is involved in the car's design and shape, and its driver will be Andy Green, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot and Oxford mathematics graduate. Green holds the current land speed record, 763 miles per hour, set in 1997.

..."None of this would be possible without the use of mathematics," Evans said. “As things stand, the maths tells us that 1,000 mph is possible."

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Hawking steps down as Lucasian professor in UK

LONDON — Physicist Stephen Hawking stepped down Wednesday as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University after 30 years in the post.

The roughly 350-year-old position has been held by such luminaries as Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of modern computing. It is customary for professors to retire from the post the year they turn 67. Hawking, who reached that age in January, will continue to work at the university as director of research at a department dealing with applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

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Eating Chocolate Makes Math Easier

Just in case you need another excuse to eat chocolate: It makes doing math easier.

A study at the UK's Northumbria University found that people given a large amount of flavanols – found in chocolate – did mental math more quickly and were less likely to feel tired or mentally drained.

In the study, volunteers first sipped chocolate drinks containing flavanols (part of a group of chemicals called polyphenols, which work by increasing blood to the brain) or a control drink. Then they were given mentally-demanding tasks, such as counting backwards in groups of three from a random number between 800 and 999 generated by a computer. They performed tasks like this for an hour.

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Using Football to Learn Algebra

People are up at the crack of dawn Sunday morning with their computers or iPhones checking their players' statistics and making trades.

For the past two years, Jenny Wilnewic, a seventh-grade math teacher at Larsen Middle School in Elgin, has brought this obsession to her classroom.

"If I can get them to play math with me, that's like three-fourths of the battle," she said. "They love to compete, and fantasy football's a fair competition between the boys and girls. It's not based on athletic ability -- it's based on who happened to pick the best team on numbers."

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(Image credits: deeproute.com, ruvilla.com)

Econometrists Calculate Fastest Possible Sprinting Time

ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2009) — Just how much faster can an athlete run the hundred metres? The current world record, which belongs to Usain Bolt, stands at 9.69 seconds. Two econometrists from the Netherlands have calculated the ultimate records possible for the 100-metre sprint.

...According to Smeets and Einmahl, the fastest time that the men are capable of sprinting is 9.51 seconds, and for the female 100m sprinters, that would be a time of 10.33. In a more cautious estimate (95% confidence), the predicted times are 9.21 for the men and 9.88 for the women.

Extreme-value theory is a sub-sector of statistics, which tries to answer questions about extreme events (which by definition are uncommon), using information about less extreme events. The theory is normally applied within the financial and insurance world to estimate the risk of extreme damage resulting from storms, earthquakes or the bursting of a dyke, for example, in order to calculate premiums.

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(Image credit: blog.wonghongting.com)

The Comic Book of Math

By JIM HOLT

Published: September 25, 2009

Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.

Improbable material for comic-book treatment? Not really. The principals in this intellectual drama are superheroes of a sort. They go up against a powerful nemesis, who might be called Dark Antinomy. Each is haunted by an inner demon, the Specter of Madness. Their quest has a tragic arc, not unlike that of Superman or Donald Duck.

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Cracking The Brain's Numerical Code: Researchers Can Tell What Number A Person Has Seen

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2009) — By carefully observing and analyzing the pattern of activity in the brain, researchers have found that they can tell what number a person has just seen. They can similarly tell how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published online on September 24th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

These findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the brain via detailed and specific activity patterns and open the door to more sophisticated exploration of humans' high-level numerical abilities. Although "number-tuned" neurons have been found in monkeys, scientists hadn't managed to get any farther than particular brain regions before now in humans.

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(Image credit: istockphoto.com)

Math That Heals Tough Wounds

ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — Scientists expect a new mathematical model of chronic wound healing could replace intuition with clear guidance on how to test treatment strategies in tackling a major public-health problem.

The Ohio State University researchers are the first to publish a mathematical model of an ischemic wound – a chronic wound that heals slowly or is in danger of never healing because it is fed by an inadequate blood supply. Ischemic wounds are a common complication of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and other conditions that can be characterized by poor vascular health.

An estimated 6.5 million people in the United States are affected by chronic wounds, and many are at risk of losing limbs or even dying as a result of the most severe of these wounds.

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Mathematicians Solve 'Trillion Triangle' Problem

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2009) — Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America have resolved the first one trillion cases of an ancient mathematics problem. The advance was made possible by a clever technique for multiplying large numbers. The numbers involved are so enormous that if their digits were written out by hand they
would stretch to the moon and back. The biggest challenge was that these
numbers could not even fit into the main memory of the available computers, so the researchers had to make extensive use of the computers' hard drives.

The problem, which was first posed more than a thousand years ago, concerns the areas of right-angled triangles. The surprisingly difficult problem is to determine which whole numbers can be the area of a right-angled triangle whose sides are whole numbers or fractions. The area of such a triangle is called a "congruent number." For example, the 3-4-5 right triangle which students see in geometry has area 1/2 × 3 × 4 = 6, so 6 is a congruent number. The smallest congruent number is 5, which is the area of the right triangle with sides 3/2, 20/3, and 41/6.

(Credit: Image courtesy of American Institute of Mathematics)

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Theory: Stone Age People had Sophisticated Navigation Networks

This is a Linked! article - relevant content for HHZ-Math and HHZ-History

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new theory based on studies of locations of large landmarks in Britain, such as stone structures, hill forts and earthworks, suggests they were part of a grid used for navigation around 5,000 years ago, which implies people at the time were not as primitive as previously thought.

The theory, put forward by Tom Brooks, a retired marketing executive turned amateur historian, claims landmarks such as Silbury Hill and Stonehenge were part of a navigation network that allowed people to travel long distances without maps.

Analyzing 1,500 sites in southern England and Wales, Brooks found that all the known sites could be connected to at least two others to make isosceles triangles, which have two equal sides. Some of the triangles have sides greater than 100 miles long, and the equal sides are accurate to +/- 110 yards, which Brooks says could not have happened by chance.

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