AMS 125th Anniversary in 2013

Posted on November 30, 2013 by Shijie Gu

125th-anniv-logoAMS members and staff celebrated the Society’s 125th anniversary at an Open House held at AMS headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island on November 14, 2013. Graduate students and long-time AMS members alike came from Rhode Island colleges and universities to celebrate, meet staff, tour the building, learn the latest about the Society’s programs, and enjoy food, refreshments, music, and, of course, birthday cake.

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JMM 2014 Flash Mob

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Tyler Clark

Last year at JMM, we did a flash human knot. We are wanting to do another flash mob. We would like it to have the theme “Connection and Collaboration.” To make this a success, we need your help.

If you have any ideas of what we can do or if you would like to assist with planning or participate in the flash mob, please email me at tyler.clark@ucf.edu.

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Holiday Math

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Maya Sharma

lenny_the_turkey_running_crazy_ty_whtI hope everyone is having a wonderful November—happy holidays, all! I thought it would be fun to share a couple math- and holiday-related links. This month marks a historic overlap between Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, as well as the annual celebration of Fibonacci Day (which took place 11/23 in honor of the first several Fibonacci numbers). Here are some posts I found interesting.

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The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Stephanie Blanda
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Photo by SAGINDIE. The work is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

What do Leonard Nimoy, Stana Katic, and Robert Downey Jr. have in common? They all have a Bacon number of 2. The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a game created early in 1994 by three Albright College students, is a classic problem in graph theory. The object of the game is to find the shortest path between a given actor and Kevin Bacon, where an intermediary connection can only be made between actors who have appeared together in a movie. For example, Stana Katic was in Stiletto with Kelly Hu, who was in The Air I Breathe with Kevin Bacon. While there is only one person with Bacon number 0 (Kevin Bacon himself), most individuals involved in the Hollywood film industry have a Bacon number of 6 or less. As of April 28, 2013, the Oracle of Bacon computed that of the actors listed on the Internet Movie Database, only 329 out of 1,605,485 have a Bacon number of 7 or higher:

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Mathematics: The Bottleneck

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Tyler Clark

geometrical_solids_sm_blkI recently read an article by Bryna Kra in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Mathemetics: 1,000 Years Old and Still Hot.” It is such a great article, I at first was not sure what more I could write. Kra begins the article on a positive note mentioning Obama’s budget request to increase STEM teachers and graduates. Then Kra gets to the crux of the issue.

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