Category: Mathematics
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Ethics in numbers = No ethics.
It's easy to understand why natural selection favors people who help close kin at their own expense: It can increase the odds the family's genes are passed to future generations. But why assist distant relatives? Mathematical simulations by a University of Utah anthropologist suggest "socially enforced nepotism" encourages helping far-flung kin. The classic theory of…
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Grothendieck, manuscripts, burning libraries..
Alexander Grothendieck, who died on Nov. 13 at the age of 86, was a visionary who captivated the collective psyche of his peers like no one else. To say he was the No. 1 mathematician of the second half of the 20th century cannot begin to do justice to him or his body of work.…
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1+2+3+… = -1/12 !? Or... "Why infinity does not exist!"
Srinivasa Ramanujan presented two derivations of "1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = −1/12" in chapter 8 of his first notebook. The simpler, less rigorous derivation proceeds in two steps, as follows. The first key insight is that the series of positive numbers 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ·…
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Maths, genes, anxiety, silence.
A new study of math anxiety shows how some people may be at greater risk to fear math not only because of negative experiences, but also because of genetic risks related to both general anxiety and math skills. The results don't mean that math anxiety can be blamed solely or even mostly on genetic factors,…
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Mathematics, Babel, 数学!
A Kazakh mathematician's claim to have solved a problem worth a million dollars is proving hard to evaluate – in part because it is not written in English. (1) Mukhtarbay Otelbayev of the Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan, says he has proved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which concerns equations that are used to…
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