Research: Math, Computing and MRI » Math

In Our Time: Unintended Consequences of Mathematics

craig — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:53:20 +0000

Another interesting Podcast, this time by Melvyn Bragg in his In Our Time show. It is on Unintended Concsequences in Mathematics and talks about cubic equations, statistics and non-Euclidean geometry.

A great comic

craig — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:43:58 +0000

From xkcd:

Radiolab Podcast on Numbers

craig — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:30:33 +0000

There is a great podcast (mp3 can be found on this page) from Radiolab that has a four part series on Numbers. The two parts that I enjoyed were on Benford’s Law (which I had not heard of before) and on the mathematician Paul Erdős.

Benford’s law basically states that the leading digit in real-life datasets is not uniformly distributed. Basically, the first digit of real-life datasets, the “1″ is more common than “2″ which is more common than “3″ etc. They give some background on how the law was found and interview someone using it in forensics.

Paul Erdős was a Hungarian born mathematician who is considered one of the brightest and most prolific mathematicians that has ever lived. The podcast gives some background to his life and the interactions he has with other mathematicians.

Very good podcast and well worth the listen…

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/09

Project Euler

craig — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:16:55 +0000

A very interesting Math type website is Project Euler. There are over 250 mathematical problems to solve in varying degrees of difficulty. The basic idea is to attempt to solve the problem using snippets of code such that the run time is less than 1 minute.

I have used this website to learn Python and have had great fun figuring out different ways of solving the problems. I can’t say all mine have completed in less than a minute, but getting there.