Mathematics

Magazine articles on mathematics.

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Science News March 18, 2006 Ivars Peterson	Winning with a Winding Random Walk For his Intel Science Talent Search math project, Yi Sun worked out the expected number of steps it takes a walker on a two-dimensional grid to encircle a given point. He also derived an explicit (very complicated) formula for the expected value of the winding number after n steps.
Chemistry World March 14, 2006 Jon Evans	Previous Research Can be a Bad Influence on Molecular Biologists Molecular biologists could inadvertently be reporting false experimental results because they are being overly influenced by previous findings, report a team of bioinformaticians.
Science News March 4, 2006 Ivars Peterson	The Limits of Mathematics No matter what the system of axioms or rules is, there will always be some assertion that can be neither proved nor invalidated within the system.
IEEE Spectrum March 2006 C. A. Fowler	Asymmetric Warfare: A Primer The armed forces of United States are the most capable military ever assembled. Are they designed, however, to handle a determined insurgency? Here's a look using famous engineer Frederick W. Lanchester's Mathematics in Warfare as a guide.
Bio-IT World February 2006 John Russell	Marvelous Models of Biological Systems Here are highlights from a roundtable discussion with researchers representing academia and pharmaceuticals, as well as executives from modeling technology providers on whether or not Pharma is ready to bet on computational modeling of biological systems.
Scientific American February 19, 2006	What is Godel's Proof? Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem demonstrates that mathematics contains true statements that cannot be proved. His proof achieves this by constructing paradoxical mathematical statements.
Scientific American February 19, 2006	Why is Turing's Halting Problem Unsolvable? A key step in showing that incompleteness is natural and pervasive was taken by Alan M. Turing in 1936, when he demonstrated that there can be no general procedure to decide if a self-contained computer program will eventually halt.
Science News February 18, 2006 Ivars Peterson	Calculating Dogs Mathematician Tim Pennings weighs in on the question of what sort of calculations dogs may do to find the optimal path to fetch a ball.
Science News February 4, 2006 Ivars Peterson	Predicting Oscar In attempting to predict this year's Oscar winners, decision scientist Iain Pardoe turns to discrete modeling to help tease out the "who's best?" controversies that have often roiled the world of film.
IEEE Spectrum February 2006 Kenneth R. Foster	Maple Goes Graphical Originating in the 1970s as a symbolic math program, Maple has evolved into a high-end math package that, its vendors claim -- probably correctly -- is used in virtually every major university and research center in the world.
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