When Marshfield math teacher Jean Kelley suggested last year that her friend Spring Sirkin produce a play about mathematics, Sirkin was skeptical.
“I didn’t think math concepts would naturally lend themselves to dramatic situations,’’ said Sirkin, whose Boston-based Chamber Theatre Productions tours the country with plays that support middle and high school instruction.
“We’ve always focused on the literature curriculum,’’ Sirkin said. “But we constantly ask teachers for feedback on what they’re reading and what they need help with. We were looking for something a little different, and when we polled teachers across the country, they overwhelmingly asked for a math play.’’
With Kelley as her consultant, Sirkin put out a call last spring to several play wrights to see what they might come up with. “Eureka!’’ by Shaun Wainwright-Branigan, jumped out at her right away.
(Image credit: 10best.com)
Physorg - Everyone knows the flip of a coin is a 50-50 proposition. Only it's not. You can beat the odds. So says a three-person team of Stanford and UC-Santa Cruz researchers. They produced a provocative study that turns conventional wisdom, well, on its head for anyone who has ever settled a minor dispute with a simple coin toss.It also could have profound implications in America's favorite sport -- pro football -- because the coin flip plays an integral role in deciding games that go into overtime.
But first, here's what the researchers concluded: Using a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins, the three researchers determined that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is perched on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.
(Image credit: gazette.uwo.ca)
- An extensive treatment of fractions appeared around 1600 B.C. in the Rhind Papyrus, which contained the work of Egyptians mathematicians.
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.
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?
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....."
Here is a really interesting trick to multiplying large numbers in your head, and quickly.....
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.
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.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...
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.
(Image credits: math.zju.edu.cn)
....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.
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.
(Image credit: topnews.in)
Published: October 01, 2009 by Jennifer Jacob Brown 
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."
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.
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.
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."
(Image credits: deeproute.com, ruvilla.com)
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.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.
(Image credit: blog.wonghongting.com)
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.
Math Concepts Explained "Explaining mathematics concepts that commonly give students the most difficulties."
Using Magic To Learn About Math: Math Hustle
Mathematicians uncover the hidden patterns and movements that snakes use to move without legs.
