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Spring 2009 archive

 

2009-05-08 1430:  Yesterday's New York Times crossword puzzle had two interesting words in it. The clue for one was "Calculus pioneer," which turned out to be EULER. The other was "Crunching sound," which turned out to be CRUMP—the first name of my colleague Professor Baker.

2009-05-04 1540:  I found out how to put make and put drawings or diagrams into a LaTeX document. (LaTeX is a commonly used mathematical typesetting language, which I use to produce mathematical documents.) The trick is to use an open-source vector graphics editor called Inkscape; you can draw diagrams involving lines, circles, rectangles or other geometrical shapes; and you can save these in LaTeX format. These can be pasted into LaTeX documents. You need the easy-to-obtain LaTeX package "pstricks" to make this work ("ps" refers to PostScript, the graphics language). Here's an example.

2009-04-28 1140:  Students considering graduate school in mathematics or other sciences might be interested in a graduate school expo that will be held in September at Purdue University up in West Lafayette.

2009-04-23 1100:  I saw something unusual just now, looking out of my office window—a helicopter landed in the parking lot. Curiosity got the better of me, so I walked down to see why. (I noticed that they had that part of the parking lot barricaded, so it was clear that this wasn't an emergency, it was a planned event.) It turns out that the helicopter is an medical air evacuation craft, and it is on campus today as part of "Safety Day," an event for the children at the Child Center (daycare center) on campus. They also have a fire engine there, and I was told that the police were going to arrive with their SWAT vehicle.

2009-04-20 1750:  How time flies! I received a certificate from the Mathematical Association of America (Indiana Section), affirming I've been a member of the MAA for 25 years. The MAA is the main organization for people who teach college mathematics; they publish books and journals about mathematics and the teaching of mathematics, and host conventions for mathematics instructors and students. (They complement the American Mathematical Society, which concentrates on mathematical research; many college professors, including myself, belong to both organizations.)

2009-04-20 1745: 

I was glad we had such a good turnout for our visitor from the NSA; perhaps 20 students were there. She described the mission of the National Security Agency—signals intelligence and information assurance (code-breaking and code-making)—and what it's like to apply to the NSA and work there. She also described a bit of the mathematics behind public key cryptosystems, and she handed out some freebies such as NSA ballpoint pens. Thanks again to Drew Robertson for organizing this talk, and special thanks to our visitor for being willing to travel to Indiana and give us such an interesting talk! 

 

In the morning, I took our visitor to the University of Louisville mathematics department, to meet students there. (Much thanks to Prof. Thomas Riedel for organizing that on very short notice.) Afterwards, by Prof. Riedel's suggestion, we saw the Bullitt rare mathematics collection at the Ekstrom Library. Ms. Delinda Buie showed us first editions of the first printed versions of Euclid's Elements in Latin and also in English, and she showed us first editions of Copernicus, Galileo and also Newton's Principia, with errata notations in Newton's own hand.

2009-04-13 1440:  We will have an unusual and interesting speaker this Friday (April 17), from the National Security Agency, who will speak about the Agency and  careers there. The NSA is probably the largest employer of mathematicians in the world. It will be at 3:30 in CV105.  Many thanks to Drew Robertson for inviting Dr. Jordan and for organizing this talk.

2009-04-13 1440:  The New York Times has an interesting piece by Steve Lohr, With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? Lohr reports that science and teaching are becoming more popular; enrollments at computer science programs have increased for the first time since the tech bubble ended. Lohr also describes the Depression era, when engineering was a top career choice, and the Sputnik era, when science was a top career choice. Science and technical careers paid relatively well in those eras, but students wanted careers that mattered, careers that would be interesting and that they could be proud of.

2009-04-03 1630:  The Math Club enjoyed a topical and very interesting talk by Mr. Bryan Tannehill, who developed a mathematical model to predict several years in advance when a country becomes a failed state. He did this research for his master's thesis at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Thanks to Drew Robertson for organizing this talk!

2009-04-03 1600:  I enjoyed an unusual opportunity to meet some bright young children—I was invited to visit Utica Elementary School (in Jeffersonville), to share with a classroom of gifted 5th graders what I do as a mathematics professor, and what they can do if they want to become scientists or follow other technical careers. They asked interesting questions, and I gave them advice. One question: What if I am ahead of the class; what can I do to learn more and to be challenged? My answer: Look for interesting books to read.

2009-04-01 1645:  AEGON's Investment Management Division in Louisville has two internship opportunities, one for this coming summer, and one for fall (lasting 6 months or more). They are looking for strong mathematics students. For the first opportunity, go to www.aegonins.com and look up job 8506. For the other opportunity, go to the same web site and look up job 8555.

2009-03-28 2115:  The Abel Prize has been awarded to Mikhail Gromov. Here is the story as reported by Science magazine:

A Russian-born mathematician whose work has influenced fields from physics to biology has won this year's Abel Prize, the math field's counterpart to the Nobel. The $950,000 prize, first awarded in 2003 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, goes to Mikhail Gromov of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France.

Gromov, 65, won the award "for his revolutionary contributions to geometry," says Abel Committee Chair Kristian Seip. The mathematician, who also holds a position at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York City, is credited with making advances in the fields of symplectic and Riemannian geometry, which are closely tied to areas of mathematical physics such as general relativity and string theory. He is also credited with founding the modern study of "geometric group theory," which injects notions of distance and curvature into the study of finite algebraic structures. Gromov's work "has had a tremendous impact on geometry and has reached from there into major applications in analysis and algebra," says George Andrews, president of the American Mathematical Society in Providence. "One cannot imagine a more worthy recipient."

The Science story is behind a pay-wall, but there is more information at the American Mathematical Society web site.

2009-03-14 1514:  Happy Pi Day, Everyone!

2009-03-12 1545:  A colleague of mine (Dr. John Doyle) told me about a "Mathematical Garden" he saw in Geneva, Switzerland. I looked it up on the web, and found a link: Jardin des Maths, at the Conservitoire et Jardin Botaniques (City of Geneva). Unfortunately, this was a temporary exhibit (ending in October 2008). The web page is in French, and there is a sharp limit to my knowledge of French, but with the help of Google Translate, I have come up with the following guess as to what the page says: Spirals, golden ratio, symmetry, fractals; have you ever seen these in a flower? The theme of the new exhibition of the Conservatory and Botanical Garden is a surprise in more than one way. Indeed, the worlds of plants and mathematics are much closer than it seems. This exhibition is presented in the form of an introduction and four parts in four different locations: "Spirals, Fibonacci and plants" in and around the Temperate Greenhouse; "Fractals and plant construction" at the Villa Le Chêne; "Shapes and Actions" at the Walk of trees; "Math and Botany" in front of Villa Le Chêne. The Math garden is an invitation to our audiences, large and small, to do math in nature through the plants while having fun.

2009-03-04 1730:  The NY Times has an interesting obituary about a prominent mathematician, Jacob Schwartz, who was a founder of modern computer science.

2009-02-20 0930:  Yesterday, the Math Club enjoyed the talk by Prof. Richard Bradley, who was kind enough to visit from Bloomington to speak on N-tuplewise Independence and the Central Limit Theorem. This gave our students an interesting glimpse at some current research into probability theory. Many thanks to Drew Robertson for organizing this talk!

2009-02-10 1200:  It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday today!!

There are many interesting resources on the web about evolution. One of the best is the web site for the National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution in the schools against attacks by creationists and intelligent design proponents. Another interesting site is The Tree of Life, which is a major collaborative effort by biologists around the world to provide information about evolution and the diversity of life around the world. In that site, you can explore different families and species of organisms, arranged as a tree to show their evolutionary family relationships.

It's worth mentioning that evolution has had a significant impact on the mathematical sciences, particularly statistics. Researchers such as R. A. Fisher developed important statistical ideas and tools to solve problems in "population genetics," a key component of modern evolutionary theory. This was part of a program to reconcile Darwinian evolution with modern genetics. (Darwin did not know the laws of genetics when he published Origin of Species in 1859—they hadn't been discovered yet. Gregor Mendel published his famous work on the genetics of peas a decade later but most biologists were unaware of his work until his laws of genetics were rediscovered around 1900.) The result of this work (done in the 1920s and 1930s) is called the neo-Darwinian synthesis or the modern evolutionary synthesis.

2009-02-10 1200:  We will have two Math Club events this month:

This Friday at 4:30 Drew Robertson will speak on topology and graph theory.

And Thursday, February 19, Dr. Bradley (a statistics professor at IU Bloomington) will speak on N-tuplewise Independence and the Central Limit Theorem. This will be at 1:30-2:30 in CV212.

Many thanks to Drew for arranging these talks!

2009-02-09 1100:  The US Census Bureau is recruiting a mathematical statistician. The qualifications are a BS or BA degree in mathematics (24 hours of math) with 9 hours in statistics, but they don't need the degree in hand and the M360-366 sequence is enough statistics for them. The salary scale starts at $38,000 but goes up rapidly with experience to $73 thousand. The deadline for this position is February 18. To apply, go to www.usajobs.gov and then enter "Clark County, IN" for location. You'll get a list of jobs; scroll down to find the mathematical statistician job. Look on the tab for "how to apply" to get the application forms. If you have any questions, contact Ms. Vicki Hack at 812-218-4616.

Ms. Hack told me that they're anticipating more openings in statistics, as they gear into the 2010 US Census.

2009-02-04 1100:  I saw the NOVA episode last night on the NSA. I was rather disappointed. For a science show, there was little actual science; it was more like an episode of the PBS series Front Line (which airs investigative reports on politics and similar subjects). They did mention that the NSA is believed to have the largest group of mathematicians, computer scientists and linguists in the world. But most of the show dealt with the political and legal problems of the NSA as they tried to deal with al Qaeda before and after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

2009-02-02 1600:  Public television (KET) is showing an episode of their science show NOVA tomorrow evening at 8 pm, about the National Security Agency. The NSA is the US spy agency that specializes in code making and breaking, and "signals intelligence" (listening to communications of various kinds). They employ a lot of mathematicians, so if you're interested in math, this might be very interesting.

2009-02-02 1430:  It occurs to me that the previous two posts, concerning the mathematical typesetting language TeX, might be completely mysterious to anyone who hasn't ever heard of this language. So I thought I would give a little explanation. TeX was developed in the early 1980s by Donald Knuth, who was a Stanford University computer science professor. It is a programming language, but instead of using it to produce a program (an executable file), you use it to produce a mathematical document. You write a source code file using a text editor, which contains commands such as "\sqrt" (which produces a square root sign). Then you compile it using a TeX compiler, which produces a nicely typeset mathematical document. Here is a little example of a source code file, and the resulting typeset document (in pdf format).

I should mention that I happen to use the TeX compiler PCTeX (which is a commercial product), but there is a reasonably good free version called MikTeX. (Both of these are available on Windows. There are other implementations available for Mac or Unix.)

If anyone is curious about this, please feel free to come to my office. I'll be glad to show you more about how this software works.

2009-02-02 1430:  I just tried using the "\Color" command in a TeX document, but for some reason it didn't work. But using the named color commands, such as "\Blue" does work.

2009-01-30 1500:  For fans of TeX (the mathematical typesetting language I use to write my course materials and other mathematical documents): I found out how to put color into a TeX document. For plain TeX (and AMS-TeX), all that you have to do is put "\input colordvi" at the beginning of your document; for LaTeX, all you put is "\usepackage{colordvi}" at the beginning of your document. Then you use commands such "\Blue{$\sqrt{2}$}" (which would produce a blue square root of 2) to make things different colors. These commands can be used in math mode or in text mode; you can make individual symbols in a formula different colors.

There is a list of available colors (e.g., "Goldenrod" or "OliveGreen"), but if you want to specify your own custom colors, you can use a command like "\Color{.25 .35 .4 .1}{$\sqrt{2}$}". The four numbers in the Color command specify the values of the CMYK components. CMYK means Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black. I'm a bit fuzzy as to how this color system works, but I know it's used in printing. Beyond that, I suppose Google would be of service, or you can just experiment.

There are other commands that can set a default color for the fonts, or for the background.

For more information, see Using Color in TeX (you'll have to scroll down the document to find this).

2009-01-26 1400:  The old laser printer in my office, a Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet 4P, has been replaced by an HP Laser Jet P1505. The old machine served me well for 14 years. But it finally started to become prone to paper jams, so it had to be retired. I'll miss it.

2009-01-20 0930:  The New York Times had two articles this morning worth mentioning. The first article is an obituary: John R. Stallings Jr., 73, California Mathematician, Is Dead. Stallings did some important work on the Poincaré Conjecture.

The other article, In 'Geek Chic' and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science, talks about why there are fewer women in science than in men but why that's changing for the better.

2009-01-19 1520:  On Friday afternoon, the Math Club enjoyed a fine talk by Dr. Will Orrick of IU Bloomington, who spoke on "The Four-Color Problem." He gave a lucid explanation of the theorem, that you can color a map with four colors and have no countries of the same color share a border, and its proof.

Many thanks to Mr. Drew Robertson for organizing the Math Club, and for inviting Dr. Orrick to visit us; and many thanks to Dr. Orrick for being willing to come down from Bloomington and give such a fine talk.

2009-01-16 1030:  Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting article, Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power, about R, an open-source statistical programming language rapidly gaining popularity among researchers at universities and in industry. I've become enthusiastic about R, having been using it for the last several months for the infant feeding project I've been participating in. I must credit Prof. Albyn Jones of Reed College for introducing me to the language, and Prof. Joe Hollingsworth for bringing my attention to the article. 

To learn more about R, and to download it (it is available for Linux, the Mac OS, and Windows), go to www.r-project.org.  By the way, if you search on Goggle for just the letter R, you will get 2,850,000,000 hits but the first one will be the link given here.

2009-01-14 1215:  A friend of mine sent me a couple of links for some fractal-drawing software.  I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like fun:  Apophysics: freeware fractal flame drawer for Windows; example images at 40 Amazing 3D images using Apophysics.

2009-01-14 1200:  The newsletter for the Society for Mathematical Biology has an interesting article on mathematical oncology, the use of mathematics to study or fight cancer.  The newsletter doesn't appear to be online, but the article has a link to a nice article in Forbes magazine by Robert Langreth, Can Math Cure Cancer? (October 27, 2008).