The Abel Prize...with Math!

Defying nasty stereotypes that math is a sport for the young, the Abel Prize was again handed to a wizened old coot, this time to a geometer named Mikhail Gromov. The Abel Prize is one of the highest honors one can recieve in mathematics, and it comes with a near-million dollar purse, and a ceremony involving the Norwegian royalty.

Sounds a bit like another Scandinavian prize, eh?

The prize is named after one of my favorite mathematicians of old, Niels Henrik Abel, who died at the age of 31 some say because of anguish when his own country, Norway, would not offer him a job as a professor. Others say it was tuberculosis. Abel is now remembered as the most famous Norwegian mathematician ever, though Sophus Lie is hot on his trail.

The prize is quite young. It's first laureate was honored in 2003. The prize was a much overdue answer to the agist Fields Medal which one can only earn before one turns 40 (and which while catapulting one to fame, only awards about $15,000 per genius).

Scholarships for Wall Street...with Math!

New Jersey feels bad for the laid-off, former denizens of Wall Street. It has developed a scholarship called "Traders to Teachers" that helps these poor folk fund their way through education classes on their way to becoming math teachers.

The $4,000 per year tuition reimbursement is a far cry from the six figures they had been making, but, hey, what does it cost to save your soul?

iPhone Apps...with Math!

Making grown-ups nationwide feel real dumb, two children have developed a killer app for the iPhone. Owen and Finn Voorhees, respectively 11 and 9 years old, developed a program for Apple's smart-phone that works much like the old-school arithmetic flashcards. The Chicago Tribune's story on them might just make their 99-cents-per-download application a success.

UCSD's very own iPhone App Development Club would be proud.

Do we have here a real-life Wiggin family?

Big Money...with Math!

The UCSD math department just won the jackpot! A gift of $1 million was awarded to the school and is to be split between the math department and another department (something to do with cancer, ya da...).

Graduate students' early excitement waned when the news released that the money was to go to establish an "endowed faculty chair." A few math grads may benefit from this, though, since the endowment would, in part, provide funding for the grad students under the faculty member who holds the chair appointment.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has referred to the late benefactor, Steve Warschawski, as the "founder of the mathematics department at UCSD." This rings a bit false, since one doesn't found a college without a math department, and one doesn't found a math department independent of a college. So what the U-T seems to have meant was that Warschawski was the first math professor at UCSD.

The gift was left by Warschawski's wife Ilse (apparently in her will), who gave it in honor of her husband.

Sex...with Math!

Another high school teacher has been thrown in jail for having sex with a student. This time, though, she was a math teacher with a singing career, and they had sex in her classroom!

Of the two CDs she had released, one was full of religious music, and the other was a big math medley.

Heather Lynne Zeo was a math teacher at North Penn High School in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. This story was wonderfully reported in The Philadelphia Inquire and you can find the article here.

West Virginia...with Math!

This is so cool.

The state best known for coal mining has come out with one of the coolest math machines I've ever seen. According to The State Journal Bonita Lawrence, a professor at Marshal University in Huntington, West Virginia, and her students have designed and assembled a "differential analyzer" using Erector Sets. It's Steam Punk meets Texas Instruments. You can see a video of the machine here.

So what is it?

Well, it's machine made of gears, pulleys, widgets and whatnot that actually solves differential equations and draws the solutions. Bonita claims that it can solve some nonlinear equations that calculators just approximate.

And what does this means, exactly?

Bonita gives an amazing, lucid description of differential analysis in the video. She gives an example of her maching taking in information about the velocity and acceleration of a car (the differential equation) and popping out the position of the car (the solution).

Fantastic, right? She never mentions second derivatives or initial values, and yet she described completely to a lay-person what a differential equation and its solution look like.

Why would anyone make this?

Bonita points out that before the age of computers, a machine like this gave mathematicians their first view of a solution to differential equations. Her reasoning for reinventing the wheel was that "there are so many visual learners" and that this contraption gave her students a "visual interpretation of a mathematical equation."

In a heart-warming paean to her students and to people like me, she went on to say, "My personal opinion is that math majors can do anything." I.e. Why build this machine? Because she can.

You can see a much longer interview with this charming woman here.

Brava Dr. Bonita!

P.S. In the book The Emporer's New Mind, Roger Penrose describes the brilliant and important mathematician Alan Turing developing machines just like this before World War II. Turing earned fame for breaking the Enigma Code of the Nazi Germans during the war and then developing the theory behind the "universal computing machine" (you know...the computer). He later was thrown from the Royal Academy of Sciences for being gay and forced to undergo hormone therapy to "fix" him. He took his own life some time after this.

This amazing story is captured in the play "Breaking the Code" by Hugh Whitemore.

Wolfram/Alpha...with Math!

Mathematicians across the globe are rejoicing over the mad scientist Stephen Wolfram's new toy, Wolfram/Alpha. This Google-like website is free for everyone to use, but you get oh-so-much more than you pay for.

Type in any math expression into the search box, and Wolfram/Alpha will analyze the heck out of it. This type of analysis has in the past taken an incredible amount of time, a deep understanding of the workings of the software package Mathematica, and of course it would cost an arm and a leg (Mathematica ain't free, folks).

So Wolfram/Alpha has pulled off what computer programs do best: it takes a tedious and difficult task that needs to be done repeatedly and automates it. The free aspect is just the cherry on top. Bravo, Dr. Wolfram!


Here's one of my favorite examples involving a variant on the old "bell curve." Below is one of the wonderful pictures that the engine auto-creates.

Oh, and by the way, Wolfram/Alpha holds interest for more than just math geeks. Check out the popularity of your name, the population of your city, or diagrams of your favorite molecule. Have fun!