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Here's How Long it Would Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity
To vanquish a vampire, one generally employs a stake, a cross, a string of garlic, or a combination of all three. But there’s one highly effective anti-vampire weapon that few think to use: math. By Ella Morton. (Oct. 27, 2015)
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You Shot a Rubber Band off Your Thumb. Why Didn’t Your Thumb Get Hit?
If you shoot a rubber band off your thumb, why doesn't it hit your thumb? The answer, it turns out, involves some pretty serious physics.
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When People Are as Predictable as Water
With Simon DeDeo on cosmic microwaves and crime.
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+20 +1
The Costs of Building Pop Culture Structures
From Death Star to Hogwarts, pop culture structures are as every bit iconic as the characters. How much would they cost to build in real life? We estimate the costs of five iconic structures.
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Physicists puzzled by strange numbers that could explain reality
Is our reality, including its forces and particles, based on the strange properties of numbers with eight dimensions called "octonions"? A physicist thinks so, having found a way to expand 40-year-old research to reach surprising new directions. First, a brief history of numbers.
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An anonymous 4chan post could help solve a 25-year-old math mystery
A 4chan poster may have solved part of a very tricky math problem that mathematicians have been working on for at least 25 years. The user was just trying to figure out the most efficient way to watch episodes of a nonlinear anime series, but the result has generated considerable interest from mathematicians around the world who have no way to identify the anonymous user.
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How to Get Better at 'Back of the Envelope' Calculations
The art of estimations is pretty much a physicist's bread and butter. We all love a good estimation problem. You might also hear these called a "back of the envelope" calculation, or a calculation on a napkin. The writing medium is meant to emphasize how little preparation goes into attacking the problem. The estimator can't even take the time to find a clean sheet of paper.
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Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves
It turned out that there is the possibility of transmitting information with the help of nonmetricity waves and transferring it spatially without distortions.
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Top mathematician says he solved the 'single most important open problem' in math after 160 years
Mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah claimed he solved the "most important open problem" in maths, the Riemann hypothesis. At a lecture in Germany on Monday he...
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End of the world: MIT prediction from 1973 is proving true
An MIT model predicted when and how human civilization would end. Hint: it's soon. By Paul Ratner.
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Dijkstra's in Disguise
A weighted graph is a data structure consisting of some vertices and edges, and each edge has an associated cost of traversal. Let's suppose we want to compute the shortest distance from vertex u to every other vertex v in the graph... By Eric Jang.
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A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate
Psychedelic drugs can trigger characteristic hallucinations, which have long been thought to hold clues about the brain’s circuitry. After nearly a century of study, a possible explanation is crystallizing. By Jennifer Ouellette.
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The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature
New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”
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What Knitting Can Teach You About Math
In this professor's class, there are no calculators. Instead, students learn advanced math by drawing pictures, playing with beach balls—and knitting
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Counterintuitive examples in probability
I want to teach a short course in probability and I'm looking for some counterintuitive examples for it. Results that seems to be obviously false but they true or vice versa... I already found some
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+23 +1
Infamous three-body problem has over a thousand new solutions
A long-standing maths puzzle has 1223 new solutions, more than doubling the number of possible paths three objects can take as they orbit one another
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What is Lattice cryptography?
Lattice cryptography is interesting for a few reasons. For one thing, nobody knows how to break it with a quantum computer, which would be pretty important if anyone knew how to build a quantum computer.
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Did Math Kill God?
A new book on Renaissance mathematics makes a bold case. By Josephine Livingstone. (April 27, 2018)
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The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
"Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution." By BJ Campbell.
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The toughest math problems that challenge the world
In 1900, German mathematician David Hilbert proposed a list of 23 math problems that would change the world. Some have been solved. Others remain. DARPA attempted to update the list a few years back. Here are the highlights.
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