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The Importance Of Maths

This guy might have had Sumerian ancestors.

A Kurdish refugee to the UK is one of the four recipients of the 2018 Fields medals. Caucher Birkar was given the award at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Fields medals, often called the Nobel prize of mathematics, are awarded every four years. Medallists must be under the age of 40 by the start of the year they receive the award, with up to four mathematicians honoured at a time.

Caucher Birkar, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK won the award for his work on categorising different kinds of polynomial equations. He proved that the infinite variety of such equations can be split into a finite number of classifications, a major breakthrough in the field of arithmetic geometry. Born in a Kurdish village in pre-revolutionary Iran, Birkar sought and obtained political asylum in the UK while finishing his undergraduate degree in Iran.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-the-fields-medal-the-biggest-prize-in-maths/
 
ramonmercado said:
... Caucher Birkar, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK won the award for his work on categorising different kinds of polynomial equations. ...
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Only to have it immediately stolen ... :doh: :roll:

This Man Won The Top Prize in Mathematics — Then Someone Immediately Stole It
Yesterday (Aug. 1), University of Cambridge mathematician Chaucer Birkar won the Fields Medal — the highest prize in mathematics, awarded every four years to a small group of mathematicians age 40 or younger. The award came with a 14-carat gold medal and $15,000 (in Canadian dollars, equivalent to about $11,500 US). According to the BBC, Birkar put the medal in his briefcase, along with his wallet and phone, and left the briefcase on a table in the Rio de Janeiro conference center where the award was presented.

When he returned, the briefcase was gone. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/63244-fields-medal-stolen.html
 
ramonmercado said:
Mathematicians do their best work when they're young.
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Joking on the post. I will say Raymond with age one can also acquire a much wider base of knowledge. I knew one mathematician that was a genius and could derive equations that I could never begin to understand. He was in his mid 70's
 
On the controversial online message board 4chan, a post about how to watch a certain TV series in every possible order led an anonymous commenter to discover a new lower bound for the minimal superpermutation problem. It took a while for mathematicians to notice, and to sort through the details, but the result is now recognized as a valid theorem. We just don’t know who should get the credit!

https://www.quantamagazine.org/unscrambling-the-hidden-secrets-of-superpermutations-20190116/
 
This report discusses the concept of "numeracy" in decision making and how a surprisingly large proportion of adults aren't good at it ...

The deficiency isn't so much in basic math skills, but rather in the conceptual ability to apply and perform quantitative reasoning in addressing a given problem scenario.

Without These Basic Math Skills, Study Finds You Can't Make Effective Life Decisions

Almost a third of American adults don't have the math skills necessary to make effective decisions about their health and finances.

These 73 million people can count, sort and do simple arithmetic. But they likely cannot select the health plan with the lowest cost based on annual premiums and deductibles, or figure out that they can't pay off credit card debt based on the amount they owe, minimum monthly payments and an annual percentage rate.

These people are innumerate, meaning they're unskilled with numbers. Numerate people, in contrast, are mathematically proficient.

In our research as psychologists, we measure numeracy with a math test. If you can answer the following question correctly, your response falls in the top half of well-educated Americans, and you are highly numerate:

"Out of 1,000 people in a small town, 500 are members of a choir. Out of these 500 members in the choir, 100 are men. Out of the 500 inhabitants that are not in the choir, 300 are men. What is the probability that a randomly drawn man is a member of the choir?" (The answer is at the end of this article.)

People who are better at answering these kinds of math questions make decisions differently than those who struggle with them. The highly numerate search for and think hard about numbers when they make decisions. Ultimately, they trust numbers more and have a clearer understanding of what the numbers mean for their decisions.

The less numerate, however, rely more on compelling stories and emotional reactions in decisions rather than the hard facts. They tend to make worse decisions for themselves when numbers are involved. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/withou...ke-effective-decisions-about-money-and-health

ORIGINAL VERSION: https://theconversation.com/math-sk...hard-decisions-you-need-confidence-too-123129
 
Mathematicians, "Proving the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry is impossible."

Two high school students, "Challenge accepted."

https://www.livescience.com/high-sc...roof-to-the-2000-year-old-pythagoeran-theorem

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Two high school students say they’ve proved the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry — a feat mathematicians thought was impossible.

While the proof still needs to be scrutinized by mathematicians, it would constitute an impressive finding if true.

Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, who are seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, presented their findings March 18 at the American Mathematical Society’s (AMS) Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting.
 
kamalktk said:
Mathematicians, "Proving the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry is impossible."

Two high school students, "Challenge accepted."

https://www.livescience.com/high-sc...roof-to-the-2000-year-old-pythagoeran-theorem

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Two high school students say they’ve proved the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry — a feat mathematicians thought was impossible.

While the proof still needs to be scrutinized by mathematicians, it would constitute an impressive finding if true.

Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, who are seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, presented their findings March 18 at the American Mathematical Society’s (AMS) Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting.
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Lemme guess, these 2 students are engineers, not mathematicians.
 
kamalktk said:
Mathematicians, "Proving the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry is impossible."

Two high school students, "Challenge accepted."

https://www.livescience.com/high-sc...roof-to-the-2000-year-old-pythagoeran-theorem

-----------------------------------------------
Two high school students say they’ve proved the Pythagorean theorem using trigonometry — a feat mathematicians thought was impossible.

While the proof still needs to be scrutinized by mathematicians, it would constitute an impressive finding if true.

Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson, who are seniors at St. Mary's Academy in New Orleans, presented their findings March 18 at the American Mathematical Society’s (AMS) Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting.
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This is very impressive, if the proof is found to hold up. My initial thought upon reading the headline was that such a proof would involve some inadvertent circular reasoning, since so much of trigonometry itself relies on Pythagoras.

I shall, as they say, "watch this space".
 
Pushing the decimal point discovery back 150 years.

A mathematical historian at Trinity Wester University in Canada, has found use of a decimal point by a Venetian merchant 150 years before its first known use by German mathematician Christopher Clavius. In his paper published in the journal Historia Mathematica, Glen Van Brummelen describes how he found the evidence of decimal use in a volume called "Tabulae," and its significance to the history of mathematics.

The invention of the decimal point led to the development of the decimal system, and that in turn made it easier for people working in multiple fields to calculate non-whole numbers (fractions) as easily as whole numbers. Prior to this new discovery, the earliest known use of the decimal point was by Christopher Clavius as he was creating astronomical tables—the resulting work was published in 1593.

The new discovery was made in a part of a manuscript written by Giovanni Bianchini in the 1440s—Van Brummelen was discussing a section of trigonometric tables with a colleague when he noticed some of the numbers included a dot in the middle. One example was 10.4, which Bianchini then multiplied by 8 in the same way as is done with modern mathematics. The finding shows that a decimal point to represent non-whole numbers occurred approximately 150 years earlier than previously thought by math historians. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-decimal-centuries-older-historians-thought.html
 
A beautiful meditation on mathematics:
  • my good friend is a music student - he works and studies difficult theories about music that I can't follow
  • but he uses that esoteric knowledge to help him create music - and that music can be appreciated by anyone without any knowledge of the theory
  • this is not the case with pure math - sometimes I feel like I have created a lovely song and I desperately want to share it with the people that I love - but to them what I write on the page is just a soup of symbols
  • for others their technique serves their art - but for us our art is our technique
  • even in nearby disciplines such as physics and computer science we usually can still connect to the public in some way - because while techniques may be esoteric - the things that they are about are not
  • for example the techniques of general relativity are abstract and alien to the public - but we can still appreciate the beauty of the night sky and so we can form a connection on those grounds
  • but math can choose to cut its ties to the ground and float off into untethered abstraction which is both its great blessing and curse
 
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