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There's an old urban legend about a state legislature that passed a law redefining pi so that it equaled 3. This story is a myth - but the true story that inspired it is actually even more ridiculous and bizarre. More »
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Nikki Graziano was a photography and math student at Rochester Institute of Technology, and she found the perfect way to combine her passions. Graziano examines the shapes that appear in her photographs and overlays the mathematical functions that best describe them. More »
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In less than a decade, Sudoku has gone from obscure logic puzzle to global phenomenon. Scientists have built up an entire sub-field of mathematics around this game, mostly to answer one question: what's the toughest possible puzzle that's actually solvable? More »
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There's a longstanding myth of a gender gap between boys' and girls' math performance, suggesting some basic biological difference in how the two genders approach math. It's deeply controversial and widely discredited. And now, a new study has completely debunked it. More »
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Holidays are a good time to find the answer to complex mathematical problems using household items, MacGyver-style. One way to find pi (yes, that pi) involves a flat surface, a little twig or pin, and patience. More »
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Find out how omniscience can let one opponent make a chump of another in one paradoxical game but get completely trounced in another. Game theory at its weirdest, folks. More »
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In the spirit of such tripped-out films as Donald in Mathemagic Land comes Peter Peake's Pythagasaurus, an approximately four-minute short created by the folks at Aardman Animations. In sum, a 232 seconds well spent. More »
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Want to know how to get from New York to London? Set a course 73 degrees east of north and just keep going. Congratulations, you're on the express loxodrome. More »
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Find out about an old paradox dreamed up by mathematicians in the roaring twenties. It takes a simple (and hypothetical) hotel and uses it to peer into the eyes of the infinite. More »
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A pair of pi enthusiasts have calculated the largest chunk of the mathematical constant yet, reaching just over 10 trillion digits. Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo, respectively a computer scientist in the US and a systems engineer in Japan, fought hard-drive failures and narrowly missed widespread technical disruptions due to the Japan earthquake to break their previous Guinness world record of 5 trillion digits. More »
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The longest math proof in the world has just been completed. It began in the 1970s and was worked on by 100 mathematicians. Take a look at the math equivalent of endurance running. More »
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Do you want your share of scientific immortality? You can devote your life to mastering your field, examining the mysteries of the universe, and then finally arriving at one great discovery...but according to Stigler's Law, you won't get the credit. More »
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The Banach-Tarski Dupla-Shrinker recently made an appearance on an episode of Futurama. Using it, Bender got to make two, slightly smaller, copies of himself. The smaller Benders are why they added the 'shrinker' part of the name. The actual Banach-Tarski theorem allows an object to spawn a perfect copy of itself, at its exact size, just by being chopped into bits. More »
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Take a look at Champernowne's Constant. It's a ridiculously easy sequence to make, and yet it fooled programs designed to root out underlying order in seemingly random numbers. More »
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DNA isn't just the building block of all complex life...if you give it about eight hours, DNA can also calculate the square root of 15. It's all explained in this video, which awesomely mixes hardcore science with fairy tale storytelling. More »
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The notion of infinity is fundamentally beyond the human ability to comprehend, but that hasn't stopped mathematicians from trying. So just what is infinity, and why is there more than one of them? And just what is infinity plus one? More »
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There are numbers out there that are so enormously, impossibly vast that to even write them down would require the entire universe. But here's the really crazy thing...some of these incomprehensibly huge numbers are crucial for understanding the world. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5807256&view=rss&microfeed=true New research from Japan suggests that there may be no harm in refraining from teeth-clenching whilst performing mathematical tasks. More »
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People need language to fully understand numbers. This discovery – long suspected, and now backed by strong evidence – may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense. More »
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Pi is perhaps the most beloved number in the world. People devote an entire day to celebrating it; enthusiasts memorize it to hundreds of thousands of places; and it's even pretty useful for calculating the properties of circles and spheres. But pi hides some very important mathematical truths. Put another way, pi is just wrong. So wrong that physicist Michael Hartl says it's time to lose pi in favor of a new symbol: tau. We asked him to explain why pi has to go. More »
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Almost two millennia before the rest of humanity entered the industrial age, the Greek inventor Hero invented the steam engine, wind-powered machinery, and theories of light that couldn't be improved for centuries. And then he invented some really crazy stuff. More »
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Benford's Law says that, no matter what the measuring system, no matter what is being measured, the result is much more likely to start with 1 than with any other digit. One man put it to the test. More »
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For aesthetic reasons, plastic surgeons are sometimes required to re-position male nipples – after dramatic weight-loss for example. In such a case they are presented, in effect, with a substantially blank canvas. More »
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The ancient Greeks did it, and you can too. Find out how some easily observable facts allow you to measure the approximate distance from the Earth to the Moon. More »
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Having a little trouble in your number theory class, or just want to be able to add up a bill in your head? Scientists have discovered they can boost math ability just by applying mild electrical current to your skull. More »
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A few years ago, some mathematicians analyzed the US Congress using network theory, trying to determine which committees were linked by shared members. They discovered that the connections between committees and subcommittees changed markedly when Congress was dominated by Republicans. More »
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Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last week at 85, was to math what Carl Sagan was to astrophysics. He wasn't just a researcher; he popularized scientific thought. And he's best known for bringing fractal mathematics to the masses. More »
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String theorists and particle physicists possess skills that also come in handy when playing poker, as it's a game rife with probabilities and grueling mental calculations. Here, Jennifer Oulette of Cocktail Party Physics talks physicists who are also card sharks. More »
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With the modern onslaught of newfangled portable computers, the once mighty pocket calculator has fallen to the wayside. Let us remember the calculator's glory days with 128 different brands and 582 individual calculators. [Vintage Technology via Core 77] More »
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Imagine a form of encrypted communication so secure that it's physically impossible to access it unless you're actually at the location where you're supposed to hear it. Quantum mechanics makes location-based cryptography possible - without any pesky codes or keys. More »
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If human culture spread across several planets and no one lived on Earth, chances are a new way of tracking time would develop for the sake of inter-planetary communication, trade, and travel. More »
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Today (3/14) is Pi Day, a hallowed celebration in which radius and circumference lovers everywhere convene to eat circular pastries and challenge each other to decimal-reciting contests. Score your festivities with the awesomely underrated soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky's Pi. More »
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An economics graduate student in the UK has used the well-known Drake Equation - used to figure out how many advanced civilizations might reside in our galaxy - to determine why he hasn't had a girlfriend in three years. More »
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Behold the "Mandelbulb." This is a three-dimensional image created using the Mandelbrot set, a mathematical structure whose edges form fractals. The result is something that looks like an alien tree. Which isn't surprising, since fractals emulate patterns in nature. More »
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Last month, a group of mathematicians grabbed headlines with their mathematical model of the zombie apocalypse. But as one science journalist notes, such studies are more than amusing academic anecdotes; they can actually serve a very legitimate social interest. More »
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We may think we know how best to eradicate the zombie threat, but movies and books give us, at best, an anecdotal account of how to deal with the undead. A new paper, however, offers mathematical models for human survival. More »
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Two physicists have published an academic paper where they demonstrate, by virtue of geometric progression, that vampires could not exist, since they would almost immediately deplete their entire food supply (a.k.a, all of us). More »
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The London Science Museum finally completed work on the Victorian era's greatest supercomputer, the Difference Engine No. 2, 120 years after the death of inventor Charles Babbage. This five-ton machine is currently traveling across the pond to San Francisco, and will go on display in America for the first time starting May 10th at the Computer History Museum. Find out everything you wanted to know about Charles Babbage and his wonderful engines in today's triviagasm. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=381601&view=rss&microfeed=true A new Spanish film features four rival scientists struggling to solve logic puzzles before the walls of the room they're trapped in squish them into jelly. Fermat's Room combines elements of Pi (brilliant new untried math theorems) with Cube (deadly rooms that'll kill you unless you figure out the puzzle) in this new movie that'll have you wishing you paid attention back in algebra class. If the classroom was about to kill us, you can bet we would have. Fermat's Room [Variety] More »
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