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Action needed to continue receiving Math in the Media Math in the Media has moved to a new platform! In order to continue receiving each month’s posts via email, you must visit the new website to confirm your subscription: Go to https://www.ams.org/mathmedia/ Under the heading “Subscribe to Math in the Media via email,” enter your…
Adele’s ‘30’: A mathematician explores number patterns in album titles The Conversation, December 1, 2021 Pop superstar Adele has a habit of titling her albums in a peculiar way. Each album title is an integer that represents how old the singer was when she began writing the songs. David Patrick of the Art of Problem…
What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory Quanta Magazine, November 18, 2021 No hot dog is complete without a bun. So it’s maddening that you typically have to buy eight buns at a time, but you can’t buy exactly eight hot dogs. Getting one package of each will leave you with two extra…
Just how fat are the fat bears? High Country News, September 29, 2021 It’s fat bear season. Every fall, bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve gorge themselves before hibernating. Hundreds of thousands of people tune in to livestreams and vote for their favorite fat bear. But how fat are they really? In the…
How Math Solved the Case of the Volcanic Bombs That Didn’t Explode The New York Times, September 11, 2021 You probably don’t want to get up close to an erupting volcano to study the magma “bombs” that it shoots out. Luckily, the power of mathematics allowed researchers to discover why some volcanic bombs fall to…
New mathematical record: what’s the point of calculating pi? The Guardian, August 17, 2021 Pi is something more than just a number. Pi has infinitely many digits after its decimal point and no observable pattern. It’s a classic example of so-called “transcendental numbers,” which can’t be calculated from any combination of ratios, powers, and roots…
Emmy Noether faced sexism and Nazism – 100 years later her contributions to ring theory still influence modern math The Conversation, July 15, 2021 Emmy Noether is one of the most famous female mathematicians of the twentieth century. In a celebration of the 100th anniversary of some of her greatest work, Tamar Lichter Blanks recounts the…
Is This Some Kind of Code? You Can Solve the … The New York Times, June 25, 2021 What would a font based on Tetris look like? What about a Sudoku font, or a juggling font? Erik and Martin Demaine, a computer scientist and an artist, have designed a multitude of “algorithmic puzzle fonts,” mathematically…
Instagram post misleads on vaccine efficacy by conflating two different measures Politifact, May 28, 2021 Measuring the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine involves several different—and potentially confusing—statistics. When we say that the Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective, we’re talking about relative risk reduction. A recent Instagram post with thousands of likes conflated the concepts of…