math

For many years, I had my biotech students do projects where each group of students would analyze their own data, in addition to all of the data gathered by the class. I would draw a table on the white board and each group would enter their data. At the end of the class, all the groups would copy all the results into their notebooks, then analyze them in Microsoft Excel. This worked pretty well, but it wasn't perfect. There were always cases where one group would be really slow, or someone had to leave early, or I needed to use the board and couldn't. And, this method certainly wouldn't…
I was most of the way through a long post in response to a donor request, when the power went out. It is, in fact, still out at home, and the power company's web site lists an estimated restoration time of 1pm. As you might imagine, this puts something of a kink in my morning. I'm too dispirited to attempt to recreate the lost post, so here's a Dorky Poll to fill the gap. Jonathan Vos Post is out of town, so this is a good time to ask: What's your favorite bit of numerical trivia? My personal favorite numerical coincidence is the fact that the number of seconds in a year is π x 107 to three…
I had a doctor visit and a meeting schduled for this morning, which cut into my blogging time. And I have another meeting in an hour, and I need to get lunch. This sounds like a job for a Dorky Poll! So here's a quick pair of questions, based on a glance at my office shelves: What's your favorite math book? What's your least favorite? I ask this because looking at my bookshelves reveals that I have a number of books about math, and I don't really like any of them. My least favorite is easy: Arfken's Mathematical Methods for Physicists-- it's so completely useless that I'm not sure why I keep…
Bettencourt et al. in PNAS looked a variety of cities of various sizes. They wanted to determine what the effect of population size of the city has on their properties including physical properties like roads, but also economic properties like consumption. What they found was very interesting. What they found was that 1) these properties all appear to follow a power law with respect to population and 2) these properties fall into specific categories depending on the power law. The first thing we should talk about before going to this paper is what is a power law. Power laws are ubiquitous…
I'm going to be in Boston all day, visiting MIT with a bunch of students, so here's a Dorky Poll to keep you entertained while I'm gone: Which E-name mathematician do you prefer: Leonhard Euler or Paul Erdös? They're both famous, they both have Numbers, and they're both dead. You almost literally can't do physics without Euler's number, but then you can't have a geeksize war without Erdös numbers coming into it (I think mine is 6). Which is better?
Here's another interesting book from the "Review copies of books Steve gets in the mail from publication companies, like Prometheus Books, that love bloggers" series If you've read this book please let us know what you think in the comments section. Todays book is The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers. Book Description: The most ubiquitous, and perhaps the most intriguing, number pattern in mathematics is the Fibonacci sequence. In this simple pattern beginning with two ones, each succeeding number is the sum of the two numbers immediately preceding it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ad infinitum).…
Ahhh modeling... gotta love it - especially when it models something like procrastination - or "Temporal Motivation Theory" as Dr. Piers Steel from the University of Calgary business school calls it. He find these interesting things in his paper, "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure." published in Psych Bulletin: * Most people's New Year's resolutions are doomed to failure * Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination (He spent time reading self help…
Hi everyone! I've been a little lax in my posting as of late. I apologize and as soon as the holidays are over and I'm not sleeping on lots of couches in different places, I'll be more active again. In the mean time here: