And in celebration, this is my new favorite fact about pi: we have calculated pi out to over 6.4 billion digits but only 39 of them are needed to calculate the circumference of a circle as big as the universe "with a precision comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom". (via @santheo)
Tags: mathematics piMy quest for find ways to create rich mutli-media eBooks continues. As of today, I have not found any interesting authoring tools that are based on open-standards like the ePUB format. Several videos of prototypes for content delivery are floating around the interwebs, some of which I relays in a previous post here (see UPDATED: Popular Science's Magazine of the Future. Is this the Textbook of the Future, too?).
Take a listen.
If you are intrigued by this, you might also like these general audience books on the topic:
Here you can find Simon Singh's 5 Numbers program on the BBC. Here is a link to his Another 5 Numbers.
If you know of other interesting books, web pages, magazine articles that touch on this topic and would be appealing to a college-bound student, let me know in the comments!
This morning, I saw a tweet that drew my attention to the Mathematical Association of America's web page for the 2010 Math Awareness Month, [here]. The month is sponsored by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics
This post is inspired by the overblown and overhyped forecasts of American major media (and government) meteorologists. their recommendations regarding severe weather and dangerous travel have always seemed hyperbolic to me. Then, when I read the Discovery.com blog post here, I felt one of my buttons pushed, and I had to express this exasperation somewhere. Here's the quote from the post that set me off:
I certainly hope that no one will be killed or injured from this, but I also know that there will always be people who don’t heed the warnings. If only more people understood that science works, and that geologists and volcanologists know their stuff. They devote their lives to this field, and their study of the Earth and its paroxysms may save the lives of others. When I read this, I certainly empathized with the author and could project sympathy and concern for the residents of Legzapi, Philipines whose lives were threatened by the volcano, Mayon. However, the text is a nice example of a rhetorical flourish aimed at the non-scientific populace that, in the long term, contributes to the widening of the divide between those who appreciate the contributions of science to society and those who are frustrated by the empty day-to-day promises made by science to America. This idea that "there will always be people who don’t heed the warnings" of scientists who "know their stuff" about predicting natural disasters concerns me. Surely, the geologists and volcanologists who are monitoring Mayon are making their recommendations regarding evaluation and so forth with the best possible intentions. But let's look to meterologists in the United States as examples of scientists who "know their stuff" and who make recommendations to the general populace through local and national media. Are they scientists who make their recommendations on the basis of cutting-edge technology and data-based decision making? Do they make measured and reasonable recommendations on the nightly and 24/7 channels? If we could do a better job of making science relevant and beneficial to the day-to-day American, maybe we could encourage more young people to pursue educational and career paths toward science and mathematics. And this is what America needs -- the new economic and philosophical patriotism is a devotion to the study and implementation of skill and talent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). But we won't be able to turn the hearts of America in this direction without helping them to understand its benefits and how it can positively impact peoples' day-to-day living. This short post (a rant, really), can't do this issue justice. It's just SOOO big. But the article that inspired this reveals a slice of what's wrong with the American perception of STEM and how it serves (or fails to communicate truthfully and effectively) society and its needs.In college, I had eclectic interests. That must be why I went to a liberal arts institution, eh? For some reason, human cognition interested me, though I wasn't able to articulate it in that way at the time. From time to time, I'd pick up a Psychology Today at the library and thumb through its pages. Once, I ran across an article about mathematics and the mind. As a mathematics major, this article had great appeal to me. The thesis of the article was that mathematical thinking was not entirely natural, that it was learned, sometime with much effort. I remember xeroxing that article and filing it away.
In my first semester as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina (Go Heels!), I was given the responsibility for teaching a course on trigonometry. I was pursuing a Ph.D. to become a college math prof like my heros Paul Humke and Ted Vessey, so I welcomed the teaching assignment. At one point during the course, I remember pulling out the xerox of that article from Psychology Today and sharing it with my students. My point in doing so was to let them know that they should not let their struggles with course materials get them down. Their struggle is natural. Psychologists says so. My students responded very positively to that. In retrospect, they might have decided to use that article to rationalize their mediocre performance in my course. But I remember them being more engaged in the material. Putting more effort into the course after we talked about that old black-and-white article. This is what I thought of when I began listening to NYC RadioLab's recent podcast (a.k.a. essay), Numbers.
