RODNEY WOODSON never set out to be a pig trapper. He joined the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency because he was passionate about conserving water birds. But that was before the hogs rocked up, with their high libidos and low cunning. Across the world, and especially in the southern US, feral pigs are a problem. Marauding hordes
AT SOME point in their career every mathematician comes up against the question, is mathematics invented or discovered? The query makes some cranky. The answer doesn’t directly affect their work, after all, and the discussion often leads nowhere useful. Spending time debating the ultimate nature of mathematics takes away from actually doing it.
Patents for software? Read More »
As the world waits for the next installment of news in the hunt for the Higgs boson, a simple smart phone game encourages players to hide, not hunt, the world’s favourite particle. Read more in this New Scientist article.
Agent Higgs game turns real particle hunt on its head Read More »
The largest proof in mathematics is colossal in every dimension – from the 100-plus people needed to crack it to its 15,000 pages of calculations. Now the man who helped complete a key missing piece of the proof has won a prize. In early November, Michael Aschbacher, an innovator in the abstract field of group theory
Prize awarded for largest mathematical proof Read More »
Tibetan singing bowls, ancient instruments used for meditation, can be manipulated to produce droplets that levitate, bounce and skip across water. When one adds water to a Tibetan singing bowl and plays – often by tracing the edge with a mallet – the bowl’s haunting sound is accompanied by ripples on the water’s surface. That’s because
Tibetan singing bowls Read More »
Mathematician Richard Hamilton was named a co-winner of the 2011 Shaw Prize for Mathematical Sciences. The honor comes with a $500K check. Hamilton is best known as the architect of the Ricci flow, a mathematical process that formed the foundation of Grisha Perelman’s 2006 proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Perelman turned down the Fields medal
Turning math into money Read More »
What’s the hardest straight-in shot in pool? Mathematician tries to find out in this article for New Scientist. This article is behind a paywall and I haven’t yet uploaded a pdf. Email me, and I’ll send you a copy.
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.
The Perfect Way to Slice a Pizza Read More »
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.
Wallpaper for a Hyperbolic World Read More »
