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.
Posts published in “For Math’s Sake”
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.