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Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics
Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the fractions—all the numbers you’ve known since elementary school. But in mathematics, the simplest things are often the hardest to understand. They’re simple like a sheer wall, without crannies or ledges or obvious properties you can grab ahold of.
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Mathematical mystery of ancient Babylonian clay tablet solved
UNSW Sydney scientists have discovered the purpose of a famous 3700-year old Babylonian clay tablet, revealing it is the world's oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, possibly used by ancient mathematical scribes to calculate how to construct palaces and temples and build canals.
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Maryam Mirzakhani’s Pioneering Mathematical Legacy
The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Friday, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces—“science-fiction mathematics,” one admirer called it—and to her young daughter, Anahita, as something of an artist. At the family’s home, near Stanford University, Mirzakhani would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading Anahita, now six, to exclaim, “Oh, Mommy is painting again!”
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Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies
Acclaimed Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani dies of breast cancer aged 40.
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A Math Genius Blooms Late and Conquers His Field
On a warm morning in early spring, June Huh walked across the campus of Princeton University. His destination was McDonnell Hall, where he was scheduled to teach, and he wasn’t quite sure how to get there. Huh is a member of the rarefied Institute for Advanced Study, which lies adjacent to Princeton’s campus. As a member of IAS, Huh has no obligation to teach...
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Kid calls 911 for help with math.
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The 'Complex Systems Theorist' Who Predicted the Arab Spring
In early 2011, a few days before Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the middle of a busy street, Yaneer Bar-Yam sent his research to the US government. Bar-Yam's message was simple: If drastic measures weren't immediately taken to lower skyrocketing global food prices, widespread violence would occur. Bouazizi's act set off food riots and are widely seen as the beginning of the Arab Spring.
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A Mathematician's Secret: We're Not All Geniuses
For each certified genius, there are at least a hundred great people who helped achieve such outstanding results.
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Creating The Never-Ending Bloom
John Edmark's sculptures are both mesmerizing and mathematical. Using meticulously crafted platforms, patterns, and layers, Edmark's art explores the seemingly magical properties that are present in spiral geometries. In his most recent body of work, Edmark creates a series of animating “blooms” that endlessly unfold and animate as they spin beneath a strobe light.
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Meet the first woman to win the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics"
On Wednesday, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman in 78 years to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, considered the highest honor in mathematics. She was selected for "stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces." The Fields Medal is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to outstanding mathematicians under 40 who show promise of future achievement.
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We couldn’t live without ‘zero’ – but we once had to
Mathematician Hannah Fry tells the intriguing story of how the number zero was ‘discovered’ – and why we couldn’t predict the future without it.
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You Will Easily Understand This Math Problem That No One Can Solve
A kid can understand the question, but no one can answer it. By Jay Bennett.
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Think you're a code-breaker? Try these GCHQ puzzles
Sharpen up your codebreaker skills with these games from a new GCHQ puzzles book, seen first by the Telegraph. Think you've cracked them? More fiendish puzzles await... General hint: Many of the puzzles may look more intractable than they really are. In a lot of cases the trick is to approach the puzzle with the right mindset – in other words to think like a GCHQ puzzle setter.
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5 Simple Math Problems No One Can Solve
Mathematics can get pretty complicated. Fortunately, not all math problems need to be inscrutable. Here are five current problems in the field of mathematics that anyone can understand, but nobody has been able to solve.
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Why Blind People Are Better at Math
Bernard Morin developed glaucoma at an early age and was blind by the time he was six years old. Despite his inability to see, Morin went on to become a master topologist... By Diana Kwon.
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When Blind People Do Algebra, The Brain's Visual Areas Light Up
People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain. A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And as the equations get harder and harder, activity in these areas goes up in a blind person," says Marina Bedny, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
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Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’
Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific 'families', one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. The insight comes from an analysis of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), which aims to connect all mathematicians, living and dead, into family trees on the basis of teacher–pupil lineages, in particular who an individual's doctoral adviser was.
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Essence of linear algebra
3Blue1Brown
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Inspired by Genius: How a Mathematician Found His Way
The mathematician Ken Ono believes that the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan—mathematical savant and two-time college dropout—holds valuable lessons for how we find and reward hidden genius.
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Sphere Packing Solved in Higher Dimensions
A Ukrainian mathematician has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24. By Erica Klarreich.
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