Mathematics
A Walk Through the Woods Leads to Insight on Numbers
You're familiar with partition numbers, even if you don't recognize the term; even kindergartners know them. The partition of a number is all the ways that you can use integers to add up to that number. Start with 2. There is only one way to get there: 1 + 1. The number 3 has 2 partitions: 2 + 1 an...
January 24, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Comedians Discussing Chaos Theory? Only on British TV
One of the things I love about visiting the U.K. is British television. Specifically what my friend calls "quiz shows." That's not quite the right name for them, though, because they usually consist of a panel (or two) of comedians discussing anything from current events to music to natural history...
October 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Science of Football
A roundup of how scientists explain America's most popular sport
September 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Time to Stop Measuring Fuel Economy in MPG?
Today, if you go to buy a new car, you'll find a sticker like the one on the right giving you a bunch of data on fuel economy: the miles per gallon you'll get on the highway and in the city and the estimated annual fuel cost (based on 15,000 miles driven over a year and gas costing $2.80 per gallon...
September 01, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Calculus Diaries
Though I was a very good at math in school, I usually found the subject incredibly boring, so much so that I often slept through class (teachers didn't mind as long as I aced the exams). The one exception was a college math course for biologists that gave us real-world problems like figuring out th...
August 31, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Coral Reef Constructed From Yarn
This fall, a different kind of coral reef will be on display in the National Museum of Natural History's Ocean Hall. It's not made out of the calcium carbonate skeletons of living coral. It's made out of wool. And acrylic, and cotton, and whatever other fibers local yarn artists get their hands on....
July 29, 2010 |
By admin
How Much of Your Tax Money Went to Science?
By now you probably should have mailed off those forms or pushed the send button on that computer program—it's April 15, tax day—though I'm sure there are plenty who will be making that 11:45 p.m. drive to the post office tonight. I've joked in the past that my tax money only goes to science (someo...
April 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Level Playing Field for Science
I suppose, in a way, I should thank the woman who tried to compliment me when I was in high school by saying that I was too pretty for science. What she was really saying was that girls don't belong in science, and that got me so riled up I'm still ticked off nearly two decades later. But at least ...
March 23, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Elementary School Teachers Pass on Math Fear to Girls
We know that girls can do math, and be very good at it. But a new study published this week in PNAS shows that some girls in elementary school aren't learning just how to add one plus one—they are learning that girls should be scared of those numbers. Just like their teachers.University of Chicago ...
January 26, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Finding Art Fakes through Computer Analysis
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a 16th-century painter from the Netherlands known for his landscape paintings populated by peasants (though you may also be familiar with his version of the Tower of Babel). He also produced dozens of drawings and prints. In the early 1990s, though, several Alpine drawi...
January 05, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Ten Movies We Loved From the 2000s
The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we'll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed: A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work i...
December 16, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—A Fractal in 3-D
There is something we find beautiful about fractals, those curious geometric structures with repeating shapes that seem to go on for infinity (see video below). Perhaps it is because these mathematical oddities remind us of nature; river networks, ferns and Romanesco broccoli are all examples of na...
December 04, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Decade of Great Moments in Science
Has it really been 10 years since we were all panicking about the Y2K bug? Yes, it's the end of another decade, and as with any good publication, we're going to overload you with lists as we pause to reflect. What's first? The 10 greatest moments in science, in ascending order:10. Hurricane Katrina...
December 01, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Using Math to Examine Iran’s Election Results
Statisticians and political scientists have been having a field day with the results from the Iranian elections earlier this month. Was the election rigged? We may never know, but there is enough buried in the math to make us think that it might have been so. Even then, though, there is also enough...
June 25, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Caricature of a Female Scientist
I hadn’t intended on writing about my Saturday excursion to the theater, even though the play, Legacy of Light, was about two female scientists; the play’s run ended on Sunday. However, I’m so disappointed, and I have to tell you why.The play follows two women: French mathematician and physicist Ém...
June 16, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Girls CAN Do Math (Duh)
In 2005, when then-president of Harvard (and current Obama advisor) Larry Summers posited that biological differences might be one reason why women have not been as successful as men in math and science careers, he was only the latest man to make that suggestion. Back in 1887, George Romanes declar...
June 04, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Crocheting a Coral Reef
I had no idea that crochet was best way to model hyperbolic geometry. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard about hyperbolic geometry until I watched the video below, a TEDtalk given this past February by science writer Margaret Wertheim. Her project—crocheting a coral reef—began in 2005 and was inspir...
May 13, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Learning About Magnets, Electricity and Acceleration at the Amusement Park
After mentioning the Six Flags America Roller Coaster Design Contest earlier this month, I received an invitation to Physics Day at the amusement park. I had to convince my boss I didn’t intend to ride roller coasters all day (unlikely, since I get queasy riding backwards on the Metro), but then I ...
April 27, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Female Scientists Aren't THAT Rare
Tuesday on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner posed the following question from a reader:I am an economics teacher from Alaska. I can personally list my top 10 favorite actors, top 10 favorite living writers, top 10 favorite rock groups, and even my top 10 living economists and top 10 entreprene...
April 02, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Booting Up a Computer Pioneer’s 200-Year-Old Design
Charles Babbage, the grandfather of the computer, envisioned a calculating machine that was never built, until now
April 02, 2009 |
By Aleta George
