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The forecasts of global warming are based on the mathematical solutions of equations in models of the weather.  But all of these solutions are inaccurate. Therefore no valid scientific conclusions can be made concerning global warming. The false claim for the effectiveness of mathematics is an unreported scandal at least as important as the recent climate data fraud. Why is the math important? And why don't the climatologists use it correctly? Mathematics has a fundamental role in the development of all physical sciences. First the researchers strive to understand the laws of nature determining the behavior of what they are...

boom in affordable housing in the 1950s was helped by the invention of a distinctive multifunctional piece of equipment: the backhoe. Its strong yet relatively slender articulated arm allowed precise yet rapid placement for digging or lifting. The manipulative device is trim and fast, since hoses transfer power to it from a powerful hydraulic pump within the main chassis. The "arm" of the backhoe makes many people think the equipment design is similar to a human arm, but what makes it so versatile is that it is actually more like a giant human finger. If a valuable piece of equipment...

Enlarge ImageObviously. The area of this triangle is 13, a congruent number. Credit: L. Blizard/Science Quick! What do the numbers 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, and 23 have in common? If you said they're all "congruent" numbers--numbers related to the areas of certain triangles--then you may be one of those folks who scored an 800 on your math SAT. Even if that answer didn't leap to mind, you may be intrigued to know that mathematicians have now cataloged the congruent numbers--which are easy to define but not so easy to spot--up to a trillion. A...

Environmentalism cannot explain all behavior It is obvious and true that one’s environment influences one’s behavior. A Chinese will tend to act differently than a Russian; for example, they will tend to celebrate different holidays and show variation in respect to their elders, purely because of socialization. No one disputes this. It is also true and obvious that one’s physiology and biology, one’s neurochemical makeup, influences one’s behavior. A 250-pound, muscle-bound man is more likely to play for the NFL than is a short, 150-pound, desk-bound man. Goldberg is fond of repeating, “an adult male’s ability to grow a moustache...

Even a popular president like Barack Obama cannot win arguments against two forces: God and mathematics. While the president has openly shared his reverence for the former, he has decided to take on the latter. It’s a fight that he will lose. Upon taking office, President Obama decided to postpone his campaign promise to implement a true cost-saving reform of Social Security and Medicare. Instead, he’s trying to expand the nation’s entitlement offerings with massive new government spending on health care. The Congressional Budget Office’s mid-July “score” of the main House health-care bill puts the price tag at about $1...

In the TV Show NUMB3RS Charlie Eppes, a world-class mathematician, helps his FBI Agent brother solve many of his perplexing FBI cases through different mathematical formulas. NUMB3RS is coming to life, but in this case its not Crimes the world class mathematician is solving, but pandemics. The math whiz's at Tel Aviv University have developed a formula to predict that path of pandemics like the swine flu. This is important because it will direct authorities when to close mass transit, shut down and even how to distribute doctors and medicines. It wont prevent swine flu but it will predict the...

Caution: political-party purists may be miffed by this article; but I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Adolf Hitler was a poor student of mathematics, but he got the hang of it sufficiently to figure how to take over the German government. A “majority,” Hitler reasoned, consisted of 51 per cent of the votes necessary to control 51 per cent of the seats in the legislature – - 26 per cent of those voting, in other words. Unfortunately, the majority of Americans now find themselves victims of the same political calculation. Polls indicate that the liberal Democrats now in charge...

Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences released Beyond Bias And Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which found “pervasive unexamined gender bias� against women in academic science. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration cabinet secretary, chaired the committee that wrote the report. When she spoke at a congressional hearing in October 2007, she warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate� women face in university science. This “crisis,�...

In a recent study, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have discovered a new pattern in primes that has surprisingly gone unnoticed until now. They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. In addition, this same pattern also appears in another number sequence, that of the leading digits of nontrivial Riemann zeta zeros, which is known to be related to the distribution of primes. Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications...

A French-Russian mathematician has won the Abel Prize today for his work on advanced forms of geometry. The winner of the 6 million Norwegian kroner (US$920,000) prize, Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, has held a permanent appointment at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) outside Paris since 1982. The Abel committee cited Gromov specifically for his contributions to three sub-disciplines of modern geometry: the study of Riemannian space, symplectic geometry, and groups of polynomial growth. Gromov is "renowned among mathematicians for his original approach", says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at the University of Warwick in Coventry. Among other things, modern geometers...

No one suspected that Ax + By = Cz (note unique exponents) might also be impossible with co-prime bases until a remarkable discovery in 1993 by a Dallas, Texas number theory enthusiast by the name of Andrew Beal. Beal was working on FLT when he began to look at similar equations with independent exponents. He constructed several algorithms to generate solution sets but the very nature of the algorithms he was able to construct required a common factor in the bases. He began to suspect that co-prime bases might be impossible and set out to test his hypothesis by computer....

Is mathematics the language of the universe?MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math's ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality? The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But...

From Sandro Magister of Chiesa, a piece about Pope Benedict XVI's interest in the nature of mathematics within the relationship of faith and science: Scientists of worldwide fame, like Richard Dawkins of England and Piergiorgio Odifreddi of Italy, insistently link mathematics with the profession of atheism. Spread through conferences, articles, and best-selling books, their theories aspire to become a common language and philosophy. In simple terms, the objections to these atheist mathematicians are the ones expressed by a 17-year-old Roman high school student, Giovanni, during a question-and-answer session with the pope in St. Peter's Square, crowded with young people on...

Mathematicians Land Top Spot in New Ranking of Best and Worst Occupations in the U.S. BY SARAH E. NEEDLEMANThe Wall Street Journal Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S. "It's a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school," says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of...

Nov. 23 -- BURLINGAME -- California's largest teachers union will back a fight in court to overturn the state's new eighth-grade algebra requirement. The Burlingame-based California Teachers Association has joined the lawsuit by the California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators against the state Board of Education's decision to require all middle school students to be tested in Algebra I by the end of eighth grade starting in 2011. The state board "acted abruptly, imprudently and without fully understanding the consequences of its actions on our schools, teachers and students," said David Sanchez, president of the...

The New York Times recently reported on a study that found, once again, that the United States is failing to develop the math skills of its students, particularly girls, especially compared to other countries where math education is more highly valued. -- Snip--- Bob Compton, an Indianapolis-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded Indian Math Online, hatched the idea when he was producing “Two Million Minutes”, a documentary comparing high school education in India, China and the United States. He realized that Indian teenagers who were the same age as his daughters were three years ahead of them in math.

Not Ready for Algebra by: Irene Warren, November 04, 2008 A trend shows that elementary and advanced math students have fallen below the national average. The Brown Center on Education Policy hosted an event at the Brookings Institution recently to discuss possible ways to better prepare students to succeed in higher-level math courses. “Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student” the Brookings Institution noted in an October 2008 events announcement. “From 1990 to 2007, national enrollment in algebra courses soared from 16 percent to more than 30 percent of all eighth graders.” However, proficiency scores...

WASHINGTON: Americans may like to make fun of girls who are good at math, but this attitude is robbing the country of some of its best talent, resear chers reported on Friday. They found that while girls can be just as talented as boys at mathematics, some are driven from the field because they are teased, ostracized or simply neglected. "The US culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys," Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who led the study said in a statement. "The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top...

French primary school children will be learning multiplication tables by rote and conjugating verbs in the pluperfect tense under a back-to-basics programme to be introduced after the summer holidays. Critics denouced Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister who developed the plan, as old-fashioned, out-of-touch and reactionary, and unions called for a strike over the reform.He responded by saying: “It's not by listening to a great pianist for hours on end that you become one, it's by doing your scales.” The programme is an attempt to prioritise French and mathematics on a primary school curriculum that has been loaded with subjects such...

Hundreds of years ago in Japan, people offered thanks to the gods by sacrificing a horse or a pig. Horses and pigs, however, were valuable and expensive, so poor folks had a hard time expressing their gratitude. So they came up with a solution: Rather than sacrificing a horse, they would simply draw a painting of a horse on a wooden tablet and hang it in the temple. Then someone, most likely an impoverished samurai, realized that horses and pigs were hardly the only thing that could be drawn on a tablet. He had the idea of painting something original,...

American students’ math achievement is “at a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide, according to a new report by a federal panel, which recommended that schools focus on key skills that prepare students to learn algebra. “The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,” said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. “Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as likely to graduate from college compared to students with...

Mathematicians often rhapsodize about the austere elegance of a well-wrought proof. But math also has a simpler sort of beauty that is perhaps easier to appreciate: It can be used to create objects that are just plain pretty—and fascinating to boot. That beauty was richly on display at an exhibition of mathematical art at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego in January, where more than 40 artists showed their creations. Michael Field, a mathematics professor at the University of Houston, finds artistic inspiration in his work on dynamical systems. A mathematical dynamical system is just any rule that determines...

Two British researchers challenged the conventional history of mathematics in June when they reported having evidence that the infinite series, one of the core concepts of calculus, was first developed by Indian mathematicians in the 14th century. They also believe they can show how the advancement may have been passed along to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who are credited with independently developing the concept some 250 years later... historian of mathematics George Gheverghese Joseph of the University of Manchester, who conducted the research with Dennis Almeida of the University of Exeter... says that no one has yet firmly...

An international team of mathematicians announced in May that they had factored a 307-digit number—a record for the largest factored number and a feat that suggests Internet security may be on its last legs. “Things are becoming less and less secure,” says Arjen Lenstra, a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Switzerland, who organized the effort. Messages in cyberspace are encrypted with a random 1,024-bit number generated by multiplying two large primes together. But if hackers using factorization can break the number into its prime multipliers, they can intercept the message. Factorization currently takes too long to...

Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software. The tool, called Sage, faced initial skepticism from the mathematics and education communities. "I've had a surprisingly large number of people tell me that something like Sage couldn't be done -- that it just wasn't possible," said William...

...Tegethoff used to teach what she called "very boring math," using worksheets of addition and subtraction problems. Now her lessons delve into algebraic thinking. By the third grade, Viers Mill Elementary students are solving equations with letter variables. Long considered a high school staple, introductory algebra is fast becoming a standard course in middle school for college-bound students. That trend is putting new pressure on such schools as Viers Mill to insert the building blocks of algebra into math lessons in the earliest grades. Disappointing U.S. scores on international math tests have added to the urgency of a movement that...

According to M. J. Mcdermott, a meteorologist and Q13 Fox News (Seattle) weather reporter, the ongoing American mathematic illiteracy may be the result of misguided “reformed math” curriculum which fails to teach students the internationally recognized, efficient multiplication and division algorithms that older generations of Americans learned. Instead, children are encouraged to problem-solve without first developing efficient problem-solving techniques in multiplication and division. Math by CalculatorAs McDermott notes in her video, textbooks such as the 4th and 5th grade versions of Everyday Mathematics devote copious pages to non-germane topics such as a full-color 48-page world atlas to assist students in...

My 9th grader needs to write a 10 page term paper for her 10th grade honors math class. (Which I find strange). Anyway she is having a difficult time choosing a topic - it cannot be a biography. She was thinking about writing about math used in computer graphics, but she is having a difficult time finding sources that are written anywhere near her level. She needs at least one text as a source - it cannot all be from the internet. Any of you math teachers, general brainiacs, computer geniuses etc. out there who could offer suggestions on a...

Burden of Proof Published On Wednesday, December 06, 2006  9:17 PM By LOGAN R. URY Contributing Writer At 10:02 a.m., the door to Science Center room 109 creaks opens, and 11 young men shuffle in. Some wear worn baseball caps and faded sweatshirts, others jeans and scuffed loafers. Whispering and rubbing sleep out of their eyes, they slowly settle into their seats, filling only two rows of their long and narrow classroom. Class begins immediately as Professor of Mathematics Dennis Gaitsgory dashes in, dressed haphazardly in a button-down over a gray undershirt, most likely plucked from the same pile as...

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science". The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed. In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe. A motorist who has a near miss, for instance,...

EVERYONE knows men are promiscuous by nature. It’s part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. Surveys bear this out. One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible...those survey results cannot be correct. It is about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. ...is not...

The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand. Each yellow nub in the center of this daisy is actually its own miniature flower, complete with a full set of reproductive organs. The buds form interlocking clockwise and counterclockwise spirals.Scott Hotton A surprising number of plants have spiral patterns in which each leaf, seed, or other structure follows the next at a particular angle called the golden...

GLENDALE, Ariz., May 7, 2007—The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) has placed a professor on forced administrative leave and has recommended that he be terminated for e-mailing a Thanksgiving message to his colleagues last November. On the day before Thanksgiving, Professor Walter Kehowski sent out the text of George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1789” and a link to the webpage where he’d found it—on Pat Buchanan’s web log. After several recipients complained of being offended by the e-mail, MCCCD found Kehowski guilty of violating the district’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policy and technology usage standards. Kehowski then contacted...

Roger Highfield describes a heroic mathematical enterprise that could lay bare the fundamentals of the cosmosMathematicians have successfully scaled their equivalent of Mount Everest. Today they unveil the answer to a problem that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. At the most basic level, the calculation is an arcane investigation of symmetry – in this case of an object that is 57 dimensional, rather than the usual three dimensional ones that we are familiar with. Although this object was first discovered in the 19th century. there is evidence that it could contain...

Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government. In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming. In maths and science, key Muslim contributions such algebra and the number zero will be emphasised to counter Islamophobia. And in English, pupils will study literature on the experiences of migration - such as Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, or Brick Lane, by Monica Ali. One critic accused Education Secretary Alan Johnson...

Mathematics in Ancient Egypt the Ancient Egyptians possess an ingenious skill for calculation? Assem Deif* works out an ancient problem The Greeks developed mathematics as a deductive science that reached its climax with Euclid of Alexandria in his masterpiece The Elements. Before that, during the ancient Egyptian era, mathematics was an inductive discipline of a utilitarian nature used to perform practical tasks such as flood control or land measurement using rope. It has been suggested that mathematics then amounted to no more than the two-times table and the ability to find two-thirds of any number. The whole structure of Egyptian...

As it usually does, the fall season brought another shower of blue-ribbon reports about the sorry state of American education. You could hear the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from one coast to the other. But two reports in particular caught my eye, one for what it didn't say and one for what it did, boldly. Strangest of all, both reports came out of sectors of the education establishment that are not accustomed to self-criticism. The first was the work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which issued a paper calling for "more coherence (in) the very diverse mathematics curricula...

NEW YORK -- A high school senior from Oregon won a $100,000 scholarship at one of the nation's premier high school science competitions on Monday for his research in a new area of mathematics called string topology. The research conducted by Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, a student at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Ore., could provide knowledge that mathematicians and physicists might apply to understand electricity, magnetism and gravity, judges at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology said. "His work is at the Ph.D. level, publishable and already attracting the attention of researchers," said competition judge Michael Hopkins,...

Nearly three and a half centuries of scientific study and achievement is now available online in the Royal Society Journals Digital Archive following its official launch this week. This is the longest-running and arguably most influential journal archive in Science, including all the back articles of both Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings. For the first time the Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the internet to explore.

The countries that outperform the United States in math and science education have some things in common. They set national priorities for what public school children should learn and when. They also spend a lot of energy ensuring that every school has a high-quality curriculum that is harnessed to clearly articulated national goals. This country, by contrast, has a wildly uneven system of standards and tests that varies from place to place. We are also notoriously susceptible to educational fads. One of the most infamous fads took root in the late 1980’s, when many schools moved away from traditional mathematics...

The earliest treatise on algebra is the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus (c.1700 BC). But in c.3000 BC Egyptians called it "aha Calculus" because "Aha," "Ahe," or "Ahau" was the name of the second pharaoh of the first dynasty. Meaning mass, quantity, or heap (a pile of many things), it was used as an abstract term for the unknown in an equation. Originally, the word "algebra"-("al" "from Egypt"--"al-Kemit")--meant the reuniting of broken parts and was later defined by the Arabs as "restoration", including "bone setting". Note that Yin and Yang are also about the union of separate parts... Africans found a place...

Grigory Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal today. Grigory Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal today.

See for example this thread first. A math genius is a recluse his employer had cut him loose! A Million-Buck Prize? It's such a surprise ehen he just shrugged and said, "What's the use?"

Grisha Perelman, where are you? Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right. Now they say they have finished his work,...

NEW DELHI: There is hope for the “mathophobic”. A new tool for Indian school children promises to vanquish the dreaded math nightmare. Leading e-learning solutions provider, Educomp, has launched Mathguru to “change the way students learn math”. The math-aid programme is designed to help students from class VI to XII solve problems as per the NCERT school curriculum. “Mathguru will make math fun and easy,” says Shantanu Prakash, managing director of the company. “It shifts the learning process from a passive instructive mode to an exploratory mode,” he adds. Speaking at the launch of the programme, former academic director of...

LONDON (Reuters) - If the numbers 13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5 ring a bell, it might be because you have been reading "The Da Vinci Code". Dan Brown's bestseller uses that series -- a mixed-up version of a sequence of numbers brought to the Western world by a 13th century Italian mathematician -- as a clue to a secret Swiss bank account. As Brown's book, and the film, turned into a global entertainment phenomenon, the work of Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa was given a new lease of life for millions of people. Not so for Elizabeth Miller. The technical analyst had long been a...

Modern methods of teaching maths which have mystified parents and confused many pupils are to be abandoned six years after the Government forced them on primary schools. The same unit at the Department for Education which devised the strategy now wants teachers to go back to the "standard written method" it abolished. The decision has prompted a backlash from some primary teachers and maths advisers who say children are better able to understand the concept of arithmetic when they break sums down into a series of units. They say the "back to basics" approach heralds a return to the "dark...

In their search for patterns, mathematicians have uncovered unlikely connections between prime numbers and quantum physics. Will the subatomic world help reveal the elusive nature of the primes?In 1972, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an article called "Missed Opportunities." In it, he describes how relativity could have been discovered many years before Einstein announced his findings if mathematicians in places like Göttingen had spoken to physicists who were poring over Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. The ingredients were there in 1865 to make the breakthrough—only announced by Einstein some 40 years later. It is striking that Dyson should have written about...

Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science. Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that "Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices." The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company. Alon told TheMarker in an interview six months ago that the university had registered a patent on the invention....

Artist Tony Robbin is trying to help people imagine what four dimensions would look like to our three-dimensional world. "I have many three-dimensional patterns that are woven together in ways that are impossible in three dimensions but are possible in four dimensions," says Mr. Robbin. "It shows us a way to be omniattentive, being able to pay attention to many things at the same time." The New York City artist is displaying his paintings and digital prints until June 16 in the gallery of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Northwest. Yale University Press recently published his...