Over the past weekend, extreme weather events across the continental United States abounded, from a blizzard and flooding in and around Los Angeles to record high temperatures for February in Florida and other parts of the Southeast.
Posts published in “For Math’s Sake”
This past Tuesday marked another Valentine’s Day, an exciting but also fairly stressful holiday due to the expectations it seems to set on love and relationships.
My girlfriend got me a copy of Matt Parker’s Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World as a Christmas gift.
This past Saturday, I hit the submit button on all my applications for Ph.D. programs in mathematics. I ended up applying to five schools, which was narrowed down from the 10 or so schools I had on the shortlist for much of the fall semester.
One of the difficult aspects of mathematics is that it often scales poorly with the complexity of the problem. Math is great when there are relatively few variables and nice functions (for instance, continuous and differentiable functions) involved.
With the 2022 midterms being held on Tuesday, I wanted to write an article connecting mathematics to election modeling. What first came to mind was the statistics of polls and how predictions on election outcomes are made prior to the actual counting of the votes.
Trick-or-treating was my favorite part of Halloween growing up. I loved to walk around, see other people’s costumes, and collect a hearty stock of candy to eat over the next few months.
I was very excited earlier this week to receive a suggestion from one of my good friends about what to write for this column.
Human interaction and decision-making are challenging to quantify. When we think about all the factors that play into a decision or encounter between groups of people—each person’s motivations, the amount of information each person holds, the cooperation between different people involved—the system quickly becomes a vast complex of inputs and outputs, with no clear function on how to get from one to the other.
Patterns pop up all the time in nature, and they are typically very appealing to us. From appreciating the look of a flower to enjoying the tidiness of one’s room, order and structure are pleasing to the eye and soothing to the brain.