math

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Inside the Netflix Recommendation Engine

Netflix makes a business out of getting subscribers to add tons of DVDs to a list of discs that will later be mailed out. Theoretically, the more discs in that list, the longer that subscriber will remain with the service, since new movies will just keep coming. So a big part of Netflix's business is recommending titles to subscribers based on what they've previously enjoyed. Netflix calls its recommendation system... READ ON

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Conway's Game of Life

In 1970, mathematician John Horton Conway invented a game called Life. Conway was intrigued by John von Neumann's theories about self-replicating automata: simple mathematical formulae representing virtual "life forms" that could be depicted in a virtual world. Of course, in von Neumann's day the "virtual world" was a piece of graph paper with some squares filled in (squares being the life forms), but still, it was a pretty cool idea. Conway took von Neumann's ideas a step further, creating a computer... READ ON

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Explaining the "Dark Labyrinth" of Particle Physics

Garrett Lisi is a physicist...and a surfer who lives in a van down by the beach. In his TED Talk from February, he described a way of understanding the world (as a large thing) by looking at the tiniest things we can find. How does the world work at tiny scales? How does the Large Hadron Collider help us figure this out? How is a coral a pretty good metaphor for the patterns of subatomic particles? Lisi explains all of this in surprisingly followable language. (I did find myself rewinding and... READ ON

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Math Homework I Wish I Still Got

Call me a nerd (hey, I do write for Mental_floss), but I kind of miss my math homework. Back in the days before algebra and trig, math homework meant math problems embedded in intricate stories, arithmetic trickery and the occasional logic puzzle. In short, they were the kinds of puzzles that people secretly love to do in their free time. But once high school hit, math problems got a lot more tedious and complex and less fun. Now that I'm in college, I've completely ditched math and if it... READ ON

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Evolving New Ways to Walk

Darwin@Home is a computer program created by Gerald de Jong to model evolution. While it aspires to be a general-purpose evolution platform, at the moment it does something pretty remarkable: it takes virtual creatures designed by humans and evolves them until they can walk. Because Darwin@Home's creatures are non-biological, they can have all kinds of strange body plans -- they aren't limited to the bodies we're familiar with in Earth-based biology. In the video below, de Jong shows a series of... READ ON

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How Statistics Fool Juries

Peter Donnelly is a statistician with a sense of humor. He starts his talk with a classic statistician joke: "How do you tell an introverted statistician from an extroverted statistician? The extrovert is the one who looks at the other person's shoes." But he's not all fun and games. In a 2005 TED Talk, Donnelly explains a little about with it's like to be a professional statistician, then launches into a fascinating explanation of how statistics are misunderstood by typical audiences. He gives... READ ON

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The Arecibo Message

Let's say you're a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you format it, since you don't have any concept of the recipient's language or cognitive abilities? What would be most interesting and salient to a completely unknown civilization? Given the limits of the exercise, there are only a few known factors about the recipient: you can assume that the... READ ON

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The Old Calculator Web Museum

Remember that old paper-tape calculator your folks used to do their taxes? Or the crazy beige 70's calculator your high school math teacher insisted on using? Well, those look positively modern compared to what you'll find at The Old Calculator Web Museum, an extensive collection of vintage math machines. The calculators in this online collection range from simply antiquated to utterly bizarre. Others look like they're taken from early NASA programs (surprise -- the Wang LOCI-2 was indeed used to... READ ON

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Spore: The Buzz Begins

I've wanted to play Will Wright's next game, Spore, for years. I first wrote about Spore way back in February 2007, proudly and naively stating that "our wait will soon be over." Well, I was right if by "soon" I meant "in another year and a half." Spore has been in development since 2000, and it finally has a reliable release date: September 7, 2008. Let's hope the wait has been worth it. Spore is a video game unlike any other. Following in the tradition of Wright's SimCity and The Sims, it's a... READ ON

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Garkov: Math Invades Garfield Parody

There's a special place in my heart for weird Garfield parodies, but today's subject really raises the bar for weirdness. The Garkov comic strip activates my Nerdy Spidey Sense, as it uses a Markov chain process to create the absurdist dialog. For those of us who don't know/care what a Markov chain really is, let's just say it's a mathematical process that takes an existing body of text (say, all the dialog from Garfield comic strips) and uses it to create new text that almost makes sense. Created by... READ ON