What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences PDF Author: Barry Cipra
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780821890431
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Mathematicians like to point out that mathematics is universal. In spite of this, most people continue to view it as either mundane (balancing a checkbook) or mysterious (cryptography). This fifth volume of the What's Happening series contradicts that view by showing that mathematics is indeed found everywhere-in science, art, history, and our everyday lives. Here is some of what you'll find in this volume: Mathematics and Science Mathematical biology: Mathematics was key tocracking the genetic code. Now, new mathematics is needed to understand the three-dimensional structure of the proteins produced from that code. Celestial mechanics and cosmology: New methods have revealed a multitude of solutions to the three-body problem. And other new work may answer one of cosmology'smost fundamental questions: What is the size and shape of the universe? Mathematics and Everyday Life Traffic jams: New models are helping researchers understand where traffic jams come from-and maybe what to do about them! Small worlds: Researchers have found a short distance from theory to applications in the study of small world networks. Elegance in Mathematics Beyond Fermat's Last Theorem: Number theorists are reaching higher ground after Wiles' astounding 1994 proof: new developments inthe elegant world of elliptic curves and modular functions. The Millennium Prize Problems: The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million dollars for solutions to seven important and difficult unsolved problems. These are just some of the topics of current interest that are covered in thislatest volume of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences. The book has broad appeal for a wide spectrum of mathematicians and scientists, from high school students through advanced-level graduates and researchers.

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences PDF Author: Barry Cipra
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780821890431
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mathematicians like to point out that mathematics is universal. In spite of this, most people continue to view it as either mundane (balancing a checkbook) or mysterious (cryptography). This fifth volume of the What's Happening series contradicts that view by showing that mathematics is indeed found everywhere-in science, art, history, and our everyday lives. Here is some of what you'll find in this volume: Mathematics and Science Mathematical biology: Mathematics was key tocracking the genetic code. Now, new mathematics is needed to understand the three-dimensional structure of the proteins produced from that code. Celestial mechanics and cosmology: New methods have revealed a multitude of solutions to the three-body problem. And other new work may answer one of cosmology'smost fundamental questions: What is the size and shape of the universe? Mathematics and Everyday Life Traffic jams: New models are helping researchers understand where traffic jams come from-and maybe what to do about them! Small worlds: Researchers have found a short distance from theory to applications in the study of small world networks. Elegance in Mathematics Beyond Fermat's Last Theorem: Number theorists are reaching higher ground after Wiles' astounding 1994 proof: new developments inthe elegant world of elliptic curves and modular functions. The Millennium Prize Problems: The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million dollars for solutions to seven important and difficult unsolved problems. These are just some of the topics of current interest that are covered in thislatest volume of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences. The book has broad appeal for a wide spectrum of mathematicians and scientists, from high school students through advanced-level graduates and researchers.

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences PDF Author: Barry Cipra
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780821885963
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The AMS series What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences distills the amazingly rich brew of current research in mathematics down to a few choice samples. This volume leads off with an update on the Poincare Conjecture, a hundred-year-old problem that has apparently been solved by Grigory Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia. So what did topologists do when the oldest and most famous problem about closed manifolds was vanquished? As the second chapter describes, they confronted asuite of problems concerning the ''ends'' of open manifolds ... and solved those, too. Not to be outdone, number theorists accomplished several unexpected feats in the first five years of the new century, from computing a trillion digits of pi to finding arbitrarily long equally-spaced sequences ofprime numbers. Undergraduates made key discoveries, as explained in the chapters on Venn diagrams and primality testing. In applied mathematics, the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics continued to stir up interest. One team proved new theorems about the long-term evolution of vortices, while others explored the surprising ways that insects use vortices to move around. The random jittering of Brownian motion became a little less mysterious. Finally, an old and trusted algorithm ofcomputer science had its trustworthiness explained in a novel way. Barry Cipra explains these new developments in his wry and witty style, familiar to readers of Volumes 1-5, and is joined in this volume by Dana Mackenzie. Volume 6 of What's Happening will convey to all readers--from mathematical novicesto experts--the beauty and wonder that is mathematics.

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, Volume 3

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, Volume 3 PDF Author: Barry Cipra
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780821803554
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Beautifully produced and marvelously written this volume contains 10 articles on recent developments in the field. In an engaging, reader-friendly style, Cipra explores topics ranging from Fermat's Last Theorem to Computational Fluid Dynamics. The volumes in this series are intended to highlight the many roles mathematics plays in the modern world. Volume 3 includes articles on: a new mathematical methods that's taking Wall Street by storm, "Ultra-parallel" supercomputing with DNA, and how a mathematician found the famous flaw in the Pentium chip. Unique in kind, lively in style, Volume 3 of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences is a delight to read and a valuable source of information.

Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences

Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences PDF Author: Nicholas J. Higham
Publisher: SIAM
ISBN: 0898714206
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Nick Higham follows up his successful HWMS volume with this much-anticipated second edition.

Fueling Innovation and Discovery

Fueling Innovation and Discovery PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309254736
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
The mathematical sciences are part of everyday life. Modern communication, transportation, science, engineering, technology, medicine, manufacturing, security, and finance all depend on the mathematical sciences. Fueling Innovation and Discovery describes recent advances in the mathematical sciences and advances enabled by mathematical sciences research. It is geared toward general readers who would like to know more about ongoing advances in the mathematical sciences and how these advances are changing our understanding of the world, creating new technologies, and transforming industries. Although the mathematical sciences are pervasive, they are often invoked without an explicit awareness of their presence. Prepared as part of the study on the Mathematical Sciences in 2025, a broad assessment of the current state of the mathematical sciences in the United States, Fueling Innovation and Discovery presents mathematical sciences advances in an engaging way. The report describes the contributions that mathematical sciences research has made to advance our understanding of the universe and the human genome. It also explores how the mathematical sciences are contributing to healthcare and national security, and the importance of mathematical knowledge and training to a range of industries, such as information technology and entertainment. Fueling Innovation and Discovery will be of use to policy makers, researchers, business leaders, students, and others interested in learning more about the deep connections between the mathematical sciences and every other aspect of the modern world. To function well in a technologically advanced society, every educated person should be familiar with multiple aspects of the mathematical sciences.

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences PDF Author: Barry Cipra
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 9780821889992
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This is the inaugural issue of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences, an annual publication that surveys some of the important developments in the mathematical sciences over the past year or so. Mathematics is constantly growing and changing, reaching out to other areas of science and helping to solve some of the major problems facing society. Here you can read about how computers can't always be trusted to provide the right answer, how mathematics is contributing to solving environmental problems, and how mathematicians have solved a longstanding problem about the way a drum's shape affects its sound. What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences aims to inform the general public about the beauty and power of mathematics.

The Rainbow of Mathematics

The Rainbow of Mathematics PDF Author: Ivor Grattan-Guinness
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393320305
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description
"For Ivor Grattan-Guinness . . . the story of how numbers were invented and harnessed is a passionate, physical saga."--"The New Yorker." The author charts the growth of mathematics through the centuries and describes the evolution of arithmetic and geometry, trigonometry, and other disciplines.

A Challenge of Numbers

A Challenge of Numbers PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309041902
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
A Challenge of Numbers describes the circumstances and issues centered on people in the mathematical sciences, principally students and teachers at U.S. colleges and universities. A healthy flow of mathematical talent is crucial not only to the future of U.S. mathematics but also as a keystone supporting a technological workforce. Trends in the mathematical sciences' most valuable resourceâ€"its peopleâ€"are presented narratively, graphically, and numerically as an information base for policymakers and for those interested in the people in this not very visible, but critical profession.

The Finite Field Distance Problem

The Finite Field Distance Problem PDF Author: David J. Covert
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 1470460319
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Erdős asked how many distinct distances must there be in a set of n n points in the plane. Falconer asked a continuous analogue, essentially asking what is the minimal Hausdorff dimension required of a compact set in order to guarantee that the set of distinct distances has positive Lebesgue measure in R R. The finite field distance problem poses the analogous question in a vector space over a finite field. The problem is relatively new but remains tantalizingly out of reach. This book provides an accessible, exciting summary of known results. The tools used range over combinatorics, number theory, analysis, and algebra. The intended audience is graduate students and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the unknown dimensions of the problem. Results available until now only in the research literature are clearly explained and beautifully motivated. A concluding chapter opens up connections to related topics in combinatorics and number theory: incidence theory, sum-product phenomena, Waring's problem, and the Kakeya conjecture.

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science PDF Author: E. Roy Weintraub
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383802
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics. Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics—both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge—have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations—tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.