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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...

Published online: 28 February 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060227-3 Were ancient Minoans centuries ahead of their time? Unprecedented mathematical knowledge found in Bronze Age wall paintings. Philip Ball Did the Minoans understand the Archimedes' spiral more than 1,000 years before him? A geometrical figure commonly attributed to Archimedes in 300 BC has been identified in Minoan wall paintings dated to over 1,000 years earlier. The mathematical features of the paintings suggest that the Minoans of the Late Bronze Age, around 1650 BC, had a much more advanced working knowledge of geometry than has previously been recognized, says computer scientist Constantin Papaodysseus of...

After decades of efforts to encourage women to pursue math and science, the most enduring accomplishment may be the continuing downhill trend in the academic performance of boys. The Boston Globe reported that a male high school student is suing his school for alleged discrimination against boys. Through summer programs in science for girls, affirmative action hiring by university science departments, consciousness-raising programs for parents designed to educate them on how to create a fairer school environment for their daughters, plenty of time, attention and money has been lavished on female achievement. In spite of the vast efforts to rescue...

It was 9:45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Jane Reiser's mathematics class in Room 18 was stuffed with sixth- and seventh-graders. There were 32 of them, way above the national class size average of 25. Every seat was filled -- 17 girls, 15 boys, all races, all learning styles. A teacher's nightmare. And yet, despite having so many students, Reiser's class was humming, with everybody paying attention. She held up a few stray socks to introduce a lesson on probabilities with one of those weird questions that interest 11- and 12-year-olds: If you reach into your sock drawer in the...

The only reason I passed algebra is because my mother literally sat with me every night in seventh grade as I wailed and wept over my cruel algebra homework, which she understood quite well but I never really did. (So much for the notion that all math-deficient girls need is math-whiz female role models.) I managed to keep the basic facts in my head just long enough to get a C in the class and do well enough on the SATs a few years later to get into UCLA, and that was the end of my algebraic education. In those...

A recent report in Horsefeathers on the way in which education schools like the one at Brooklyn College indoctrinate prospective teachers may have left the impression that the litmus test of “disposition”—evaluating a prospective teacher’s politics—applied only to the so-called soft subjects: the social sciences and—heaven help us—the humanities. Not so. Even mathematics is being taught in the public schools from the perspective of the radical social agenda. “Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice” is an actual course given at Northeastern University’s School of Education in Boston. According to the course description [click HERE], future teachers of algebra, trigonometry and geometry...

... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler,...

Our brains have become too small to understand math, says a rebel mathematician from Britain. Or rather, math problems have grown too big to fit inside our heads. And that means mathematicians are finally losing the power to prove things with absolute certainty. Math has been the only sure form of knowledge since the ancient Greeks, 2,500 years ago. You can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can prove two plus two equals four, always and everywhere. But suddenly, Brian Davies of King's College London is shaking the foundations of certainty. He says our brains can't grasp today's...

The Incomplete Gödel Gregory H. Moore Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Rebecca Goldstein. 296 pp. W. W. Norton, 2005. $22.95.A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. Palle Yourgrau. x + 210 pp. Basic Books, 2005. $24.Such eminent 20th-century physicists as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg are well known to almost all scientists, whether or not they happen to be physicists. Yet most scientists are unfamiliar with eminent mathematicians from the same period, such as David Hilbert (Germany) and Oswald Veblen (United States). A rare exception is John von Neumann (Hungary...

Interview with Heisuke Hironaka Heisuke Hironaka is one of the premier algebraic geometers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his 1964 work on the resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties over a field of characteristic zero, for which he received the Fields Medal in 1970. The fundamental nature of this problem was apparent to many mathematicians in the first part of the twentieth century, notably Oscar Zariski, who solved the problem for curves and surfaces and had a profound influence on Hironaka. Taking a strikingly original approach, Hironaka created new algebraic tools and adapted existing ones...

GÖDEL AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTH II [7.27.05]A Talk with Verena Huber-Dyson I doubt that pure philosophical discourse can get us anywhere. Maybe phenomenological narrative backed by psychological and anthropological investigations can shed some light on the nature of Mathematical Truth. As to Beauty in mathematics and the sciences, here speaks Sophocles' eyewitness in Antigone: "..... Why should I make it soft for you with tales to prove myself a liar? Truth is Right." Princeton, 1950sEinstein & Gödel Photo by Oskar Morgenstern, Institute of Advanced Study Archives A true Realist, a true Platonist will not stoop to choose...

My Intelligent Design Priority Dr. Robert A. Herrmann1 NOV 2000. Revised 1 MAY 2003 The general philosophic notion that natural-system behavior displays "intelligent" design is not a recent idea. My priority is that I'm the first individual to apply rigorous scientific techniques to this notion. Specifically, I've constructed mathematical models that imply that all known aspects of natural-system behavior and the patterns produced by such behavior can be "interpreted" as the direct actions of definable intelligent agents, where there is one overall controlling agent. Under this interpretation, natural-system behavior displays patterns that indirectly imply that such behavior is the result...

Interview with Martin Gardner Martin Gardner occupies a unique position in the mathematical world. The author of the “Mathematical Games” column that ran for twenty-five years in Scientific American magazine, he opened the eyes of the general public to the beauty and fascination of mathematics and inspired many to go on to make the subject their life’s work. His column was the place where several important mathematical notions, such as Conway’s Game of Life and Penrose tiles, first became widely known. It was also a place where the sheer fun of mathematical games and puzzles was celebrated and savored....

A long-obscured transcription of Archimedes' mathematical theories has been brought to light through x-rays, US scientists say. The 1000-year-old parchment, made of goatskin, contains Archimedes' original work, which was written in the 3rd century BC but copied down by a 10th century scribe. The manuscript includes the only copy in the original Greek of the treatise "Method of Mechanical Theorems", in which the Greek mathematician, physicist, and inventor describes how he developed his mathematical theorems using mechanical means. It is also the only source in the original Greek of Archimedes' theory of flotation of bodies. In the 12th century parchment...

Gödel mistrusted our ability to communicate. Natural language, he thought, was imprecise, and we usually don't understand each other. Gödel wanted to prove a mathematical theorem that would have all the precision of mathematics—the only language with any claims to precision—but with the sweep of philosophy. He wanted a mathematical theorem that would speak to the issues of meta-mathematics. And two extraordinary things happened. One is that he actually did produce such a theorem. The other is that it was interpreted by the jazzier parts of the intellectual culture as saying, philosophically exactly the opposite of what he had...

A mathematical study of the US House of Representatives reveals clear partisanship - including stacked committees - within the House. While this may not surprise political analysts, the objective analysis contradicts the US Code, which outlines US laws and suggests a just system in which all legislation receives a fair hearing from politicians who put the country’s interests ahead of their political party’s. The words “non-partisan” and “unbiased” appear frequently in the code. Among the study’s findings is that the membership of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, formed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is closely tied...

Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity's inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of postmodernism, welcome company. Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein's famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Gödel's famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg's famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be postmodern.

"The very thing!" exclaimed Professor Wogglebug, bounding into the air and upsetting his gold inkwell. "The very next idea!" Devotees of L. Frank Baum's classic children's books would quickly recognize the above excerpt as the opening of the 15th book in the Oz series, The Royal Book of Oz. They might be harder pressed to say whether these lines were actually written by Baum. The book appeared with Baum's name on the cover in 1921, which was 2 years after Baum's death, and it was billed as the final work of the Royal Historian of Oz. For decades, however, fans...

Assume that City slickers are dumb and their effects on markets can be reproduced, according to complexity theory. Roger Highfield reportsYou might be forgiven for wondering if the best way to invest in stock markets is to consult a chimpanzee first - it has long been suspected that City hotshots are just lucky, overpaid fools who work in an industry where chance rules. Aping it: buying and selling shares is as much a matter of luck as rational thought Now science is beginning to support the idea that randomness, not rationality, exerts surprising sway over the markets. The insights have...