Math in the Media
Highlights of math news from science literature and the current media
Math in the Media
Highlights of math news from science literature and the current media
March 2002
More backstage math.
The February 1 2002 Science ran ``Beautiful Mind's Math Guru
Makes Truth = Beauty,'' a piece
by David Mackenzie about Dave Beyer, the Barnard College professor who
advised the director on mathematical matters.
The focus is on the
problem that the Nash in the movie proposes to his MIT class:
For the purposes of the script, Beyer needed a problem that could be stated in terms appropriate for the course (which seems to be the old M351 Advanced Calculus for Engineers), was subtle enough to be out of reach for most undergraduates, but ``accessible enough so that Connelly's character, a bright physics student, might concoct a plausible, though incorrect, solution.'' He also wanted a problem that mathematicians would recognize as worthwhile if they thought about it. But he hoped they wouldn't. Mackenzie quotes him as saying: ``If you put enough effort into making the math credible, at a certain point you win the war. They're caught up in the movie and barely have time to recognize it's a problem in de Rham cohomology.''
``Highly enjoyable and interesting
people" Nous? David Auburn, the playwright
autor of Proof says in fact: ``The more time I spent with
mathematicians, the more I found they were highly enjoyable and
interesting people to be around.'' This quotation is highlighted
in a January 27 2002 Boston Sunday Globe article by their staff writer
Maureen Dezell, entitled ``Setting dramas of love and loss
in the world of mathematics.'' Dezell spends most of her time
on Proof and its author, who says he began writing ``a
story about sisters fighting over something they found after
their parents die,'' and chose a mathematical proof as the
disputed object ``because its fathership could be called into question
the way a painting or a manuscript couldn't.'' Auburn was
particularly pleased that the mathematical community took
the play seriously enough to organize a symposium (at NYU in
October, 2000) on the topic. ``All these prominent mathematicians
flew in and saw the show and spoke on panels.'' He reports that
Ben Shenkman, the
young actor who played Hal, and who never got beyond calculus in
college, turned to him at one point and said: ``I feel like George
Clooney at a medical convention.''
Math on 42nd street.
``Solve this problem and win a Snickers bar.'' The challenge is
thrown by Prof. George Nobl, who holds forth on 42nd Street
between 5th and 6th Avenues every Wednesday at noon. He stands by an
easel with a whiteboard and a sheaf of problems. This activity is reported in
the New York Times for February 7, 2002: ``Problems on the
Street, Solvable with a Pencil'' by Yilu Zhao. The problem of the
hour, when the accompanying photograph was taken, is ``Pete sells a
six inch pizza for $6.00. How much should he charge for a twelve inch pizza?''
Professor Nobl's goal is ``to promote the fun of math,'' and to further
his own pedagogical agenda. ``It's so easy to teach math right.
Why teach it wrong?'' Wrong means using rote learning and memorization.
Right is instilling understanding. He says, according to Zhao, that
once a student truly grasps a rule, getting the correct answer is easy.
And he is now seeking grants to start a nonprofit group to hire a few
teachers who would put up similar stands around the city.
Fourier transform of the fossil
record. This research, reported in a January 3 2002 Letter to
Nature by James Kirchner of UC Berkeley, uses spectral analysis
methods ``to measure how fossil extinction and origination rates fluctuate
across different timescales.'' His data were compilations of
fossil marine animal families and genera over the last 500
million years (Myr); his
conclusion: ``Compared with extinction rates, origination rates have equal
or greater spectral power at long wavelengths (>100 Myr), but much lower
spectral power at short wavelengths (<25 Myr).'' Implication of this
analysis: ``either the processes regulating originations have more
inertia than those driving extinctions, or that origination events
tend to be diverse and local, whereas extinctions (particularly mass
extinctions) tend to be coherent and global.'' What this means for us:
``If the continuing anthropogenic extinction episode turns out to be
comparable to those in the fossil record (which is not yet clear),
my analysis shows that diversification rates are unlikely to accelerate
enough to keep pace with it. Thus, widespread depletion of
biodiversity would probably be permanent on multimillion-year
timescales.''
Large-scale sign error.
Sign errors are the plague of calculation. But they are usually not
as interesting as the one that ensnared two groups in 1995.
In one of the Feynman integrals for the computation of the
``predicted value of the muon's magnetism,'' using the Standard
Model, they were ``misled by an
extra minus sign.'' When last year a group at Brookhaven National
Laboratory obtained an experimental value that was significantly
different, the discrepancy was interpreted by many physicists
as possible evidence of supersymmetry. But no; when Marc Knecht and
Andreas Nyffeler (Center for Theoretical Physics, Marseille)
refined the calculation, they found a different
sign for that term. The 1995 groups rechecked their work and
found where they had gone wrong; the predicted and observed values are now
only slightly farther apart than expected errors would allow. The story
is told in ``Sign of Supersymmetry Fades Away'' by Adrian Cho,
Science (News of the Week), December 21, 2001.
``The Shape of the Universe:
Ten Possibilities'' is the title of a long and lavishly illustrated
article in the American Scientist for September-October 2001.
The autors are Colin Adams and Joey Shapiro, respectively professor
and undergraduate at Williams College. The article starts from
scratch with an explanation of the topology of surfaces, and then
leaps into three dimensional manifolds. Given that the universe
is Euclidean (average curvature zero), as recent observations
of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)
seem to imply, and orientable,
there are only ten possible topologies. Six are compact (finite volume);
four are not; all are illustrated. Adams and Shapiro end by explaining
how more accurate CMB measurements in the near future may give
us a better idea of the shape we're in.
-Tony Phillips
Stony Brook
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