Million dollar math
My first feature was a piece about unsolved problems in mathematics, published in Discover in 2006. Read it here.
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The Perfect Way to Slice a Pizza
Unsolved problems make for good stories. In this case, a couple of mathematicians cracked the little-known “Pizza Conjecture,” a rigorous attempt to understand how to share a pie. I wrote the story behind the solution for New Scientist in December 2009. Read it here.
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Whatever Happened to… Smallpox?
Once the most feared disease on the planet, smallpox killed countless people in the course of human history. The first signs of smallpox are fever and aches. Then come the disfiguring pustules, often followed by death. But there hasn’t been a case in nearly 30 years. I wrote a short piece about smallpox for the
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The Proof is in the Blogging
In 2006, shortly after Grigory Perelman famously refused the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, a mathematician from Lehigh University posted online a supposed proof of another unsolved math problem. Within days, mathematicians discovered a fatal flaw in her reasoning, but in the comment section at Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong blog,
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Turning Water into Whiskey at Jack Daniel’s
Some would argue that the water flowing from a fissure in a rock in Moore County, Tennessee, is made for whiskey. “You can’t make good whiskey without good water,” says Jeff Arnett. He should know. Since 2008, Arnett has been the Master Distiller at the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. He’s only the seventh person
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Whatever Happened To… Subliminal Advertising?
In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.” Read the
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Wallpaper for a Hyperbolic World
Frank Farris is a mathematician who has some wild ideas about wallpapering your hyperbolic house. I wrote about him for New Scientist. If you subscribe to the magazine, you can read the story here. I hope to post a pdf of the story soon; in the meantime, feel free to email me for a copy.
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Whatever Happened To… Mind Control?
In the 1950s, visitors to a brothel atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill got more than just a tryst and a view of the bay. Clients were secretly dosed with LSD as CIA agents watched from behind a one-way mirror. Although it sounds like a bad late-night spy movie, Operation Midnight Climax, as it was called, was a
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8 Ways Scientists Look at—But Don’t Yet See—Dark Matter
The hunt for dark matter is on, and scientists are looking for the mysterious stuff on Earth and in space. I wrote about recent efforts to detect dark matter for the July-August 2009 issue of Discover magazine. Read the article here.
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A Shaking Star Soon Shares Its Secrets
Just as earthquakes help scientists learn about the interior of our planet, the way a star’s surface oscillates yields clues to its internal structure and other key characteristics. Researchers with the Kepler Asteroseismic Investigation are putting that concept to work on a grand scale, monitoring the surface vibrations of thousands of stars to learn their ages,
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