Feature Channels: Mathematics

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Most people think of “hacking” as a computer security issue. But, to the members of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student hackathon organization, dubbed “HackRPI,” it simply means using technology to develop or create something that’s never been used before, which for students is part of the excitement and challenge. Plans are underway to host the third annual 24-hour “hackathon” event on the Rensselaer campus Nov.12-13.

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Researchers from Moffitt Cancer Center’s Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) Department are overcoming the limitations of common preclinical experiments and clinical trials by studying cancer through mathematical modeling.

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Innovative technologies developed by researchers at Argonne and their partners earned three R&D 100 Awards on Thursday, November 3.

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The American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics this month awarded the 2017 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical  Physics to Carl M. Bender of Washington University in St. Louis. Here he explains the work that won the prize

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Beginning in early elementary school, boys outperform girls in math – especially among the highest achievers – continuing a troubling pattern found in the late 1990s, finds a new analysis led by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

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Hispanics as well as low-income workers are underrepresented in the bachelor’s degree level computer-related workforce and are among the most underrepresented groups in these career fields.

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The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is proud to announce its role in the inaugural Active Learning Day on October 25, 2016, as a part of a nationwide movement to elevate STEM education.

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Nearly 43 percent of high school seniors will need math remediation in college.

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The Department of Energy is partnering with the National Cancer Institute in an “all-government” approach to fighting cancer. Part of this partnership is a three-year pilot project called the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACSC), which will use Department of Energy supercomputing to build sophisticated computational models to facilitate breakthroughs in the fight against cancer on the molecular, patient and population levels.

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The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical Society (APS) announced today, on behalf of the Heineman Foundation for Research, Educational, Charitable, and Scientific Purposes, that Carl M. Bender of Washington University in St. Louis is the recipient of the 2017 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, which is awarded annually to honor significant contributions to the field.

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A new University of Washington study is among the first to look at why women are more represented in some STEM fields than others. Their conclusion: a masculine culture is the most powerful factor.

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David James Thouless, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, will share the 2016 physics Nobel Prize with Professor F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and Professor J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter."

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Solitary waves called solitons are one of nature’s great curiosities. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL), a team of mathematicians, physicists and engineers tackles a famous, 50-year-old problem tied to these enigmatic entities.

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Study suggests: Kids who attend more thrive more

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Jessica Sullivan, assistant professor of psychology, recently co-authored two papers: "Intensive Math Training Does Not Affect Approximate Number Acuity: Evidence from a Three-Year Longitudinal Curriculum Intervention" in the Journal of Numerical Cognition and "Does Grammatical Structure Accelerate Number Word Learning? Evidence from Learners of Dual and Non-Dual Dialects of Slovenian" in Plos One.

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Rebecca Siddall is a high school student from Oundle, UK, who spent her summer in Brookhaven Lab’s High School Research Program learning about physics from members of the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

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Children differ substantially in their mathematical abilities. In fact, some children cannot routinely add or subtract, even after extensive schooling. This new paper proposes that math disability arises from abnormalities in brain areas supporting procedural memory. Procedural memory is a learning and memory system that is crucial for the automatization of non-conscious skills, such as driving or grammar.

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David Auckly, professor of mathematics at Kansas State University, co-founded the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project to provide mathematic activities and opportunities for K-12 Navajo students in the American Southwest.

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The Exascale Computing Project today announced its first round of funding with the selection of application development proposals, including three Argonne-led projects.

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Developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a new mathematical framework sheds light on how fast a fluid moves in its environment, how much pressure it is under, and what forces it exerts on its surroundings.

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PITTSBURGH--Parents who excel at math produce children who excel at math. This is according to a recently released University of Pittsburgh study, which shows a distinct transfer of math skills from parent to child. The study specifically explored intergenerational transmission--the concept of parental influence on an offspring's behavior or psychology--in mathematic capabilities.

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The Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced today the launch of its second annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global student science and mathematics competition designed to inspire creative thinking about fundamental concepts in the life sciences, physics or mathematics.

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The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Milwaukee Public Schools have received a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve the teaching of mathematics and science in Milwaukee public high schools.

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The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) announced the first two resident projects at its new Steve and Jamie Chen Center for Innovation & Inquiry (IN2) which will open this fall: Dropdot, a new social venture in early childhood education, was named the 2016 Robert M. ‘89 and Ginger L. Chang EdTech LaunchPad recipient and IMSA senior Addison Herr was named the 2016 IN2 Impact: Community Venture presented by Sam Yagan’95 and Jessica Droste Yagan ‘95 LaunchPad recipient.

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Anyone who has lost out on an investment in recent weeks - from pension funds and stocks to the housing rental market and currency exchange - may have lost more than they realise, according to new research from the University of Stirling.

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Spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at math at four years of age, finds a new study published in Psychological Science.

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As schools across the nation gear up for the new academic year, there are a variety of education issues students and teachers will face in the coming weeks, including Common Core/Florida Standards, language and reading development, and behavioral issues in the K-12 classroom. Experts from Florida State University are available to comment on these topics.

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The number of honey bee colonies fell by nearly 12% last winter, an international study involving the University of Strathclyde indicates.

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Professors Chihiro Suzuki and Izumi Murakami's research group at the National Institute for Fusion Science, together with Professor Fumihiro Koike of Sophia University, injected various elements with high atomic numbers and produced highly charged ions(*1) in LHD plasmas. By measuring the emission spectrum of the extreme ultraviolet wavelength range, they discovered a new spectral line that had not been observed experimentally in the past. This result is not only significant for basic science research, it also is useful fundamental data for plasma application research such as the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography(*2) light sources. This research result was presented in an invited talk at the 43rd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics, which was held from July 4, 2016, to July 8, 2016.

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Physicists have discovered that the timing of electronic orders on the stock market can be mathematically described in the same way as the lifetime of a light bulb.

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Why do we feel good about giving to charity when there is no direct benefit to ourselves, and feel bad about cheating the system? Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate.

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The U.S. team of six high school students wins the 57th International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong for the second year in a row.

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University of Utah mathematicians showed it is theoretically possible to design ideal climbing ropes to safely slow falling rock and mountain climbers like brakes decelerate a car. They hope someone develops a material to turn theory into reality.

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Starbons, made from waste biomass including food peelings and seaweed, were discovered and first reported 10 years ago by the York Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence. Using these renewable materials provides a greener, more efficient and selective approach than other commercial systems of reducing emissions.

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Six students have been selected to represent the United States at the 57th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), also known as the world championship mathematics competition for high school students.

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Policies placing first-year college students assessed as needing remedial math directly into college-level quantitative courses, with additional support, can increase student success, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

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Math, biology and nanotechnology are becoming strange, yet effective bed-fellows in the fight against cancer treatment resistance. Researchers at the University of Waterloo and Harvard Medical School have engineered a revolutionary new approach to cancer treatment that pits a lethal combination of drugs together into a single nanoparticle.

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A group of Canadian/U.K. researchers mimicked the compression of a traditional French coffee-making press to characterize the dewatering properties of natural fiber suspensions.

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Physicists developed a mathematical technique that accurately orders collections of noisy snapshots of ultrafast phenomena that were recorded with extreme timing uncertainty.

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Natural selection favors people who help close kin at their own expense: It can increase the odds the family’s genes are passed to future generations. But why assist distant relatives? Mathematical simulations by a University of Utah anthropologist suggest “socially enforced nepotism” encourages helping far-flung kin.

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Although math skills are considered notoriously hard to improve, Johns Hopkins University researchers boosted kindergarteners’ arithmetic performance simply by exercising their intuitive number sense with a quick computer game.

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Residents of Wink and neighboring Kermit have grown accustomed to the two giant sinkholes that sit between their small West Texas towns.

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A new study published in Infant and Child Development by researchers from Concordia University in Montreal shows that the natural process of teaching mathematics to one another gives kids the chance to explore and construct a deeper understanding of their social and physical worlds.

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A new mathematical framework developed at Berkeley Lab, published in the June 10 issue of Science Advances, allows researchers to capture fluid dynamics coupled to interface motion at unprecedented detail. The framework, called "interfacial gauge methods", developed by Robert Saye, a Luis W. Alvarez Fellow in the Mathematics Group at Berkeley Lab, rewrites the equations governing incompressible fluid flow in a way that is more amenable to accurate computer modeling.

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Students at the University of Leicester have been using simple calculations to explain the feasibility of the powers behind of some of the most prominent comic book superheroes known around the world.

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The MAA’s American Mathematics Competition recognizes the nation’s top 12 minds

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Researchers from Michigan State University are using Mira to perform large-scale 3-D simulations of the final moments of a supernova’s life cycle. While the 3-D simulation approach is still in its infancy, early results indicate that the models are providing a clearer picture than ever before of the mechanisms that drive supernova explosions.

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In 1977, Princeton mathematician Paul Seymour made a conjecture about certain large graphs. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia Tech mathematicians have come up with a proof he was right. The conjecture is 13 words long; the proof covers 120 pages of math reasoning.

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The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D., President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been presented with the 2014 National Medal of Science, the highest honor for scientific achievement bestowed by the United States government.

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Using the same mathematical framework as the Rochester Cloak, researchers at the University of Rochester have been able to use flat screen displays to extend the range of angles that can be hidden from view. Their method lays out how cloaks of arbitrary shapes, that work from multiple viewpoints, may be practically realized in the near future using commercially available digital devices.