MachineMachine /stream - tagged with maths http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Network Science of the Game of Go http://bit.ly/JoYn3H They constructed their networks in a simple way: if one board position can lead to another, they are connected. Using a dataset of about 1,000 professional games and 4,000 amateur games, they began to construct these networks. Of course, the Go board is very large and so you can’t compare entire board layouts. Instead, they decided to make it much more tractable and look at the board composition surrounding a newly placed piece (a move in Go consists of putting a stone on an intersection of the grid lines of the board). In this case, they looked at the pieces… ]]> Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:29:50 -0700 http://bit.ly/JoYn3H The Body Counter: A statistician’s guide to mass atrocities http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/the_body_counter?page=full/the-body-counter-by-tina-rosenberg-foreign-policy A statistician’s guide to mass atrocities: http://t.co/GdyiVo8T ]]> Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:59:31 -0700 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/the_body_counter?page=full/the-body-counter-by-tina-rosenberg-foreign-policy Next Step Infinity http://edge.org/conversation/next-step-infinity/next-step-infinity-conversation-edge Next Step Infinity: "Infinity can violate our human intuition, which is based on finite systems..." http://t.co/tJ08Vvqg #x ]]> Mon, 19 Sep 2011 04:21:41 -0700 http://edge.org/conversation/next-step-infinity/next-step-infinity-conversation-edge Oh, Infinite Stream of Data and Light http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/icon/oh-infinite-stream-of-data-and-light/ Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at the edge of the white floor—the sort used in dance studios—laid across the room’s stripped wooden floorboards. They sit down in front of the screen with legs crossed, rapt in attention. Some lay flat on their backs. Others press their bodies up against the vertical screen and let the sound and light play over them. Strips of black and white flash across the screen in varying configurations, loosely attuned to… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:22:37 -0700 http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/icon/oh-infinite-stream-of-data-and-light/ The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation/the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation-scientific-american

Old Skool article @sciam : The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation #information #data

]]> Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:44:07 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation Biomathematics: The formula of life http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/04/viruses-essay-pattern Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet's living creatures, evolution, the discovery of the gene and the structure of DNA. Now, a sixth is on its way - mathematics.

Maths has played a leading role in the physical sciences for centuries, but in the life sciences it was little more than a bit player, a routine tool for analysing data. However, it is moving towards centre stage, providing new understanding of… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 03:32:59 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/04/viruses-essay-pattern James Gleick’s History of Information http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:41:08 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:43:51 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 How to Make Anything Signify Anything http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire. A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fuelled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of… ]]> Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:17:39 -0700 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php Infinite Life http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not recorded, but it must have been stimulated by experiences such as these. It may have merged in the mind of an ancient progenitor with thoughts of a God, a possessor of unlimited might, an infinite being itself. But whether or not the idea of God was born with the first thoughts of what cannot be counted, this wonderful book by an American historian of science and a French mathematician teaches… ]]> Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:18:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg Plato's stave: academic cracks philosopher's musical code http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the works of Plato.

Jay Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science, described his findings as "like opening a tomb and discovering new works by Plato."

Plato is revealed to be a Pythagorean who understood the basic structure of the universe to be mathematical, anticipating the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton by 2,000 years.

Kennedy's breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron… ]]> Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:45:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/29/plato-mathematical-musical-code Triumph of the Cyborg Composer http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/ Along with his work on synthesis, or using machines to create sounds, Cope had dabbled in the use of software to compose music. Inspired by the field of artificial intelligence, he thought there might be a way to create a virtual David Cope software to create new pieces in his style.

The effort fit into a long tradition of what would come to be called algorithmic composition. Algorithmic composers use a list of instructions — as opposed to sheer inspiration — to create their works. During the 18th century, Joseph Haydn and others created scores for a… ]]> Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/ From Eternity to Here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703436504574640151374207392.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_TOPRightCarousel The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is so patently obvious as to be unworthy of remark. But ask a theoretical physicist just how obvious that fact really is and you will soon discover that it is not obvious at all. Indeed the "arrow of time" presents one of the greatest mysteries known to modern science. Why so? Well, for a start, no one can agree on what precisely is meant by "past," "present" and "future." As for… ]]> Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:15:00 -0700 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703436504574640151374207392.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_TOPRightCarousel Myriahedral projection maps of the world http://centripetalnotion.com/2009/12/10/10:21:55/ A new technique for unpeeling the Earth’s skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world’s oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines. “Myriahedral projection” was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. “The basic idea is surprisingly simple,” says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe’s surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can… ]]> Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:50:00 -0700 http://centripetalnotion.com/2009/12/10/10:21:55/ The Higher Arithmetic - How to count to a Zillion http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2009/5/the-higher-arithmetic Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars. The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power… ]]> Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:32:00 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2009/5/the-higher-arithmetic Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All | Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=limits-on-human-comprehension Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision regarding, say, an object’s position inevitably degraded the level of certainty of its momentum. Kurt Gödel showed that within any formal mathematical system advanced enough to be useful, it is impossible to use the system to prove every true statement that it contains. And Alan Turing demonstrated that one cannot, in general, determine if a computer algorithm is going to halt. ]]> Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:35:00 -0700 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=limits-on-human-comprehension Lewis Carroll in Numberland http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Paulos-t.html Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University for most of his life. His fanciful “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are quite familiar to us, as, to a lesser extent, are his photographs of young children. In “Lewis Carroll in Numberland,” the distinguished British mathematician Robin Wilson has filled a perceived gap in the writings about Carroll by describing in a straightforward, jabberwocky-free fashion the author’s mathematical accomplishments, both professional and popular. ]]> Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:17:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Paulos-t.html The Various Workings of a Cube-Shaped Gallery | Ask MetaFilter http://ask.metafilter.com/61272/The-Various-Workings-of-a-CubeShaped-Gallery Imagine a cube-shaped building, with ten cube-shaped rooms along each side (10 rooms long, 10 high & 10 deep). Each cubular room has 4 walls, 1 ceiling and 1 floor. Each of the 6 interior surfaces in all 1000 cubular rooms is decorated with a different pi ]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2007 03:39:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/61272/The-Various-Workings-of-a-CubeShaped-Gallery Fractals http://www.flickr.com/photos/smoo/50220981/

Smoobs posted a photo:

PICT0066

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