Feature Channels: Mathematics

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Doubling times and exponential growth go hand in hand, so it became clear to Joseph Lee McCauley, when watching the COVID-19 rates, that modeling based on past infections is impossible, because the rate changes unforeseeably from day to day due to social distancing and lockdown efforts. In AIP Advances, McCauley explains how he combined math with a statistical ensemble to understand how macroscopic exponential growth with different daily rates arise from person-to-person disease infection.

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Simon Fraser University professors Paul Tupper and Caroline Colijn have found that physical distancing is universally effective at reducing the spread of COVID-19, while social bubbles and masks are more situation-dependent.

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Large objects behave in accordance with the classical laws of mechanics formulated by Sir Isaac Newton and small ones are governed by quantum mechanics, where an object can behave as both a wave and a particle. The boundary between the classical and quantum realms has always been of great interest. Research reported in AVS Quantum Science, considers the question of what makes something “more quantum” than another -- is there a way to characterize “quantumness”?

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What are the secrets behind one of the most successful fantasy series of all time? How has a story as complex as “Game of Thrones” enthralled the world and how does it compare to other narratives?

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Which is more important in the initial phase of a pandemic: taking precautionary actions or responding to its severity? That is the question that researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) set out to address in an article published in BioEssays.

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Maths – it’s the subject some kids love to hate, yet despite its lack of popularity, mathematics is critical for a STEM-capable workforce and vital for Australia’s current and future productivity. Now, new research shows that boosting student confidence is pivotal to greater engagement with the subject.

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An underground search and rescue robot, a lunar habitat, and an automated system for topping up wine barrels are among the more than 250 innovative future technology projects being showcased in this year’s Ingenuity 2020 expo at the University of Adelaide, online from Tuesday 27 October.

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The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly across the globe at an alarming pace, causing considerable anxiety and fear among the general public.

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Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, devised a novel solution based on network and information theory that makes “little data” act big through, the application of mathematical techniques normally used for time-series, to spatial processes.

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Using a new mathematical approach to screen large groups for Covid-19 could be around 20 times cheaper than individual testing, a study suggests.

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To leverage emerging computing capabilities and prepare for future exascale systems, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is expanding its scope beyond traditional simulation-based research to include data science and machine learning approaches.

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Beginning in 2015, Swan and his wife, Tina Swan, a former researcher with the University of Pittsburgh, measured city-level databases in 10 countries on a weekly and monthly basis to determine how the Internet influences the economy, especially in regard to commercial trade. They published their various studies in 2015, 2018, and 2020, most recently in the July 17, 2020, issue of the Journal of Economic Studies.

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The American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society announce Joel Lebowitz, director of the Center for Mathematical Sciences Research at Rutgers University, as the recipient of the 2021 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. The citation on the award reads: "for seminal contributions to nonequilibrium and equilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular, studies of large deviations in nonequilibrium steady states and rigorous analysis of Gibbs equilibrium ensembles."

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Children who attend preschool enter kindergarten with greater skills than those who don’t, but that advantage is nearly halved by the end of the year as their counterparts quickly begin to catch up, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

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PNNL scientists are using an advanced mathematical tool called hypergraphs to identify how human cells respond to viral infection, including the new coronavirus.

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Nathan Moody of Los Alamos National Laboratory is a co-winner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) 2021 Particle Accelerator Science and Technology (PAST) Award.

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For years the coating industry has been working on energy and environmentally friendly improvements to the automotive painting process. Toward this end, researchers in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division are partnering with one of the world’s largest paint manufacturers through a new project that aims to couple advanced mathematics with HPC resources to model the paint drying process and guide the development of new energy-efficient coating systems for the auto industry.

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How a second wave of COVID-19 infections may evolve across Europe over the next few months, using data on infection rates and travel within and between European countries, is modelled in a Scientific Reports paper.

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Mathematicians have developed a framework to determine when regions enter and exit COVID-19 infection surge periods, providing a useful tool for public health policymakers to help manage the coronavirus pandemic.

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Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute anticipate a future in which a combination of smart wearables and algorithms assess each person’s circadian rhythm and provide personalized feedback as to what light, sleep, and work schedule would be ideal for their particular internal clock. In a foundational step toward that goal, a team of engineers aims to develop reliable mathematical models that can estimate individuals’ circadian rhythms. With the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team will also develop wearable hardware and software that incorporate various sensors capable of capturing useful biometric information. That data will be used to help build and test the team’s mathematical models.

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Many complex systems have underlying networks: they have nodes which represent units of the system and their edges indicate connections between the units.

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With the support of a new National Science Foundation grant, Alhussein Abouzeid, a professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will develop a series of mathematical models that will help optimize policies governing spectrum use nationwide.

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A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization.

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Scientists are investigating how to equip quantum computers with artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches.

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A student-built simulation shows why college campuses are particularly prone to rapid spreading of COVID-19 and reinforces the need for quick testing and symptom reporting to find and isolate infected individuals.

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Sending a "selfie" to the doctor could be a cheap and simple way of detecting heart disease, according to the authors of a new study published today (Friday) in the European Heart Journal

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Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories and six other U.S. Department of Energy institutions are hiring in a variety of areas via a virtual job fair Wednesday, August 26, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (MDT) to help fill more than 600 open positions. Of those, 54 are at Los Alamos.

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The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation today announced that it is accepting applications for the 2021 Hertz Fellowship awards. The Hertz Fellowship provides financial and lifelong professional support for graduate students in the applied physical and biological sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

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In an effort to design a safe campus bus system for the fall semester in light of COVID-19, University of Michigan researchers simulated how aerosol particles exhaled from passengers sitting in any seat would travel through the vehicle under different conditions.

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Most of modern medicine has physical tests or objective techniques to define much of what ails us.

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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has reported that it found 4,432 firearms in carry-on baggage at airport security checkpoints in 2019, and more than 20,000 firearms since 2014.

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This press release was updated and reissued on 12 August following concerns about some of the mathematical conclusions*.

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In the USA, where the curve of infections has not yet flattened since the beginning of the pandemic, 158,000 people have died from Covid-19 already.

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Machine learning can assess the effectiveness of mathematical tools used to predict the movements of financial markets, according to new Cornell research based on the largest dataset ever used in this area.

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ORNL Story Tips: Pandemic impact, root studies, neutrons confirm, lab on a crystal and modeling fusion

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In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review A, the researchers lay out a theoretical scenario in which two players, playing cooperatively against the dealer, can better coordinate their strategies using a quantumly entangled pair of systems.

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A current problem for a wide range of chemists is when stirring a solution in the laboratory there is a need to check the properties of the solution and monitor how they change.

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Students attending the last 2020 Office of Science Summer Internship Virtual Lecture Series seminar learned about how national laboratories are coming together to fight COVID-19.

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In a new paper, Cornell Tech researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken – as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness.

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Episodes of social unrest rippled throughout Chile in 2019. Researchers specializing in economics, mathematics and physics in Chile and the U.K. banded together to explore the surprising social dynamics people were experiencing. In the journal Chaos, the team reports that social media is changing the rules of the game, and previously applied epidemic-like models, on their own, may no longer be enough to explain current rioting dynamics.

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Physicist Sean McWilliams has created an exact mathematical formula to explain the gravitational wave signals that have been observed from colliding black holes, which serve as a key validation of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

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Andrew Gordon Wilson and Jonathan Niles-Weed, assistant professors at NYU’s Center for Data Science and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, outline some principles to keep in mind when evaluating COVID-19-related figures cited in the news.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine are recruiting eligible children between the ages of seven and fourteen years for a Phase III clinical trial to determine whether cannabidiol (CBD) reduces severe behavior problems in children with autism spectrum disorder.

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One day, people could monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin. In a new study, University of Missouri engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor personal health.

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The soil beneath our feet is alive with electrical signals being sent from one plant to another, according to research in which a University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering participated.

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A study of 3,268 hospitals in the U.S. shows that rural hospitals are more likely than urban facilities to have access to telehealth, a once-underused service that now is playing a key role in treating coronavirus patients. The research can help U.S. hospitals understand the extent to which they are prepared for another wave of the pandemic.

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Researchers from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, EPFL (Lausanne) and Sciteb Ltd have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business manage and police Artificial Intelligence systems’ biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging commercial choices - an ethical eye on AI.

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It is well established the COVID-19 virus is transmitted via respiratory droplets. Consequently, much research targets better understanding droplet motion and evaporation. In Physics of Fluids, researchers developed a mathematical model for the early phases of a COVID-19-like pandemic using the aerodynamics and evaporation characteristics of respiratory droplets. The researchers modeled the pandemic dynamics with a reaction mechanism and then compared the droplet cloud ejected by an infected person versus one by a healthy person.