Mathematics
pontiff | September 15, 2009Those of you interested in the recent debate over math, beauty, economics, and Paul Krugman, and who are in New York on Oct 5 might be interested in a talk by Eric Weinstein at Columbia:We will be taking a position opposite to the Claim of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman:"As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth."
It is our claim that in Economics as well as Physics, Mathematics and Biology, Elegance has been an essential guide to understanding how to properly construct the foundations of…
mikethemadbiologist | September 15, 2009My colleagues have all heard of the Mad Biologist's Rule of Base Ten Numbers: when you see too many numbers that end with zero, become skeptical. That's because only one in ten numbers should do should end in zero. So, if you read news reports that routinely say, "Today, American forces blew the crap out of [number that ends with zero] enemy forces" (and with a globe-spanning garrison empire, we do read a lot of those, don't we?), nobody has a good idea what actually happened.
Likewise, if you're reading a grant proposal and each treatment will be done ten times, there probably hasn't been…
pontiff | September 11, 2009Krugman clarifies:I've been getting some comments from people who think my magazine piece was an attack on the use of mathematics in economics. It wasn't...So by all means let's have math in economics -- but as our servant, not our master.
Word.
(Of course the point I was trying to make was that I read the end of his article as suggesting that because economics must deal with the irrational and unpredictable behavior of humans, that it must therefor be messy and beyond elegant mathematical description. I don't buy this line of reasoning, as I think it is unknown whether the conclusion is…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2009One of the things that everyone has been talking about, including Obama, is slowing the growth in healthcare costs, what some have called 'bending the curve' (and if we bend it, will we Bend It Like Beckham?). But consider these per capita healthcare expenditure data from the OECD:
In case you missed, let me make this a little clearer:
Other than Canada and Norway, every other country in the OECD spends less than half of what we do per capita. And before someone starts talking about higher incomes in the U.S., Denmark has a higher median income than the U.S., but half the per capita…
pontiff | September 8, 2009Over at the most uncertain blog, he of uncertain principles (aka Chad) takes up a challenge posed by @EricRWeinstein on twitter concerning Paul Krugman's recent article on why economists got the economic crisis so wrong. Since I know even less economics than anyone around here this seems like a great opportunity for me to weigh in (this is, after all, the blogosphere!)
Krugman's article is deceptively enticing, yet I find it disturbingly inadequate. In particular the critique is very much written as a just-so story, and there is very little in terms of concrete claims made nor of actual…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2009I've posted several times about how confusing a slowdown in the rate at which things get worse (the second derivative) with an actual improvement (the first derivative) has led to some ridiculous claims about economic improvement. Keith Hennessey has a similar complaint:
He [Obama] said this first after the 2nd quarter GDP report showed a 1.1% decline, and again after last Friday's jobs report showed the U.S. economy lost 247,000 jobs in July. The President is making a common error by looking at the rate of change of a rate of change....
Wrong. Things are still getting worse, but more…
jrosenhouse | August 10, 2009You can imagine my dismay upon discovering that I had forgotten to deposit my latest Netflix offerings in the mail. Bereft of quality home entertainment to take my mind off the looming return of the students, I hopped into the Jasonmobile and sallied forth to the local Blockbuster Video.
Typically I rent back episodes of television shows. If I have the attention span for a movie, I simply go to a movie, you see. Nonetheless, I browsed the new releases and discovered an intriguing little film called Fermat's Room.
That Fermat?
So I picked up the box, noticed the first two words of the plot…
jrosenhouse | July 8, 2009The Big Monty Hall Book just got a favorable review in The Columbus Dispatch. The reviewer is Rob Hardy. He writes:
Indeed, some of the chapters here are full-power mathematics, with unknowns x, y and z, summation or conditional probability symbols, and complicated equations choked with parentheses within brackets, and more. Math phobics won't get far with such stuff, but there is enough other material here, along with different explanations of the basic puzzle, that will be of interest to anyone who likes recreational mathematics in even the slightest degree.
I was really happy to read…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2009tags: Arthur Benjamin, Mathematics, calculus, statistics, education, , TEDTalks, streaming video
Someone always asks the math teacher, "Am I going to use calculus in real life?" And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age. [2:59]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on…
mikethemadbiologist | June 22, 2009...they live in Massachusetts. Most of us have read the "ZOMG!! AMERICAN KIDZ DON'T KNOW TEH MATHZ!" stories. But a recent study (pdf), found by way of Matthew Yglesias, points out that some states in the U.S. actually do better than most countries (and then there's Mississippi, Alabama, and Washington D.C.).
The authors took the NAEP test, which is administered to U.S. fourth and eighth graders, and used a cohort which also took the international TIMSS test, to transform the NAEP data into equivalent TIMSS scores.
Looking at the fourth grade scores, MA, with an average TIMSS score of 572,…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2009A relative of mine just sent me the following brainteaser. Since it never hurts to flex one's mental muscles, I thought I'd pass it along:
It is the month of August; a resort town sits next to the shores of a lake. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.
Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 dollar bill on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.
The hotel proprietor takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to…
jstemwedel | June 13, 2009After the open house at the college radio station, I paid a visit to a now-defunct cafe that used to be downstairs from the radio station studio and found the following calculation written on the wall:
I'm a little uncertain about the first premise (that girlfriends are the product of time and money). But if that premise holds true, it's hard to deny the conclusion that girlfriends are evil.
You've been warned.
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2009Unnamed "economists" appear to claiming a light at the end of the economic tunnel because the U.S. economy 'only' lost 345,000 jobs last month, and the increase in unemployment is slowing.
We have been reduced to cheering on the second derivative.
For those of you whose math is rusty, the first derivative is the change in unemployment. A negative number is actually a good thing, since it means unemployment has dropped. The second derivative measures how large the change in unemployment is.
These "green shoots" still mean that unemployment is rising, but it's not rising as quickly. I've…
edyong | June 1, 2009History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal - the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
Now, two professors from the University of Wisconsin - Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz - have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender…
mikethemadbiologist | May 29, 2009
No, not skinny models, mathematical models. Katrina Lamb writes:
As I see it, the problem with the financial market meltdown is not that David Li published an article in the Journal of Fixed Income Securities on the Gaussian copula function, or even that in his article Li, then an analyst with JPMorganChase, identified the price of credit default swap (CDS) contracts as a seemingly elegant proxy for the mortgage market - a proxy that greatly reduced the immense complexity of modeling values and risks in this market but, as it turned out, lost a great deal of critically important…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2009The Free-Ride offspring have been using the silkworms as a springboard for discussions of math as well as biology.
We started with 16 silkworms hatched from eggs that came home last June. They were joined, a couple weeks after they hatched, by another 15 silkworms brought home from the science classroom at school.
At this point, a number of those silkworms have taken the plunge and pupated.
Counting cocoons:
As I type these words, there is one silkworm making good initial progress on a cocoon.
There are twenty cocoons that seem to be finished (including one that has two silkworms in it --…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2009One of the nice things about summer vacation is the chance to visit beautiful and scenic locales. Like Bowling Green, Kentucky. That is the home of Western Kentucky University, which in turn is hosting the 22nd Annual Cumberland Conference on Graph Theory, Combinatorics and Computing. Figured I'd drop in, give a talk, see some old friends, and do some serious hanging out. Sadly, this means I will be out of town for the rest of the week and therefore will not be blogging. Regular blogging will resume upon my return.
Who knows? Since I'm going to be in-state I just might stop off at my…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2009Jeffrey Shallit was kind enough to mention my book over at his blog. He writes:
A pleasant surprise arrived in the mail today: Jason Rosenhouse's new book, The Monty Hall Problem. I read a first draft of the book and found it excellent.
The second draft is even better, thanks in large part to Jeffrey's heroic proofreading efforts.
Alf van der Poorten says that the definition of a good book is that it mentions you. Under that criterion, this is a very good book indeed, as I appear on the back cover, giving the book an endorsement.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in probability…
jrosenhouse | May 14, 2009Update, 10:27 pm: It turns out the book is available for sale right now! So go buy one right this very second! Don't know what that June 4 date was all about...
And it's a good one! The official release date for the Big Monty Hall Book (BMHB) is June 4, but some review copies have already gone out. One of those went to Peter Flom, who is a diarist for Daily Kos. You can find the full review here.
Flom writes:
I'll mention right up front that the book was sent to me by Oxford University Press, it's called the Monty Hall Problem, the author is Jason Rosenhouse, it's due out in early…
grrlscientist | April 30, 2009tags: TEDTalks, Margaret Wertheim, mathematics, evolution, sea slugs, coral reefs, streaming video
This interesting video discusses evolution, mathematics, sea slugs, corals and crocheting as presented by science writer Margaret Wertheim [16:37]