The following links will give you a glimpse at some interesting mathematics stories that have appeared in various news media.

February 2013

Largest Prime Discovered
From Live Science: The largest prime number yet has been discovered - and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

Factoring in the Deadly Math of Cancer
From Science Daily: Two Duke researchers are focusing on the deadly mathematics behind the mutated genes and damaged cells that drive cancer. "Cancer is the end result of an accumulation of genetic mutations," says Rick Durrett, a professor of mathematics at Duke. "It can be boiled down into a series of probabilities of whether or not a cell will become mutated, whether the cell will get the correct combination of mutations to become cancerous, and at what rate the cancerous cells continue to divide."

January 2013

California State U. Will Experiment With Offering Credit for MOOCs
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: State universities in California, looking for creative ways to reduce education costs at a time of budget stress, are turning to MOOCs to offer low-cost options for students. On Tuesday (January 15, 2013), San Jose State University announced an unusual pilot project with Udacity, a for-profit provider of the massive open online courses, to jointly create three introductory mathematics classes. The courses will be free online, but students who want credit from San Jose State will be able to take them for just $150, far less than the $450 to $750 that students would typically pay for a credit-bearing course.

AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth
From NPR News: Advanced Placement exams, which many high school students use to gain course credits when they attend college, will no longer be accepted for credit at Dartmouth College, the Associated Press reports.

New Report: The Reach and Impact of Mathematical Sciences
From Science Daily: The Mathematical Sciences in 2025, a new report from the National Research Council, finds that the mathematical sciences are an increasingly integral component of many disciplines -- including biology, medicine, the social sciences, business, advanced design, and climate studies.

Basic Math Skills Linked to PSAT Math Success
From Science Daily: New research from Western University provides brain imaging evidence that students well-versed in very basic single digit arithmetic (5+2=7 or 7-3=4) are better equipped to score higher on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), an examination sat by millions of students in the United States each year in preparation for college admission tests.

A Mathematical Study of the Famous Dirac Equation That Describes Particles
From Science Daily: In 1928 the British physicist Paul Dirac put forward one of the fundamental equations that we use today to mathematically describe a spin one-half particle from a relativistic point of view. The mathematical representation that Dirac came up with enables certain particles, including the electron, to be better understood. Nevertheless, much more remains to be discovered.

How Does Your Garden Glow?
From Science Daily: Nature's ability to create iridescent flowers has been recreated by mathematicians at The University of Nottingham. The team of researchers have collaborated with experimentalists at the University of Cambridge to create a mathematical model of a plant's petals to help us learn more about iridescence in flowering plants and the role it may play in attracting pollinators.

December 2012

Math Formula Gives New Glimpse Into the Magical Mind of Ramanujan
From Science Daily: December 22 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician renowned for somehow intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without the use of proofs or modern mathematical tools. A devout Hindu, Ramanujan said that his findings were divine, revealed to him in dreams by the goddess Namagiri.

A Mathematical Formula to Decipher the Geometry of Surfaces Like That of Cauliflower
From Science Daily: Scientists at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) have taken part in a research project that describes, for the first time, that laws that govern the development of certain complex natural patterns, such as those found on the surface of cauliflower.

How Songbirds Learn to Sing: Mathematical Model Explains How Birds Correct Mistakes to Say On Key
From Science Daily: Scientists studying how songbirds stay on key have developed a statistical explanation for why some things are harder for the brain to learn than others."We've built the first mathematical model that uses a bird's previous sensorimotor experience to predict its ability to learn," says Emory biologist Samuel Sober. "We hope it will help us understand the math of learning in other species, including humans."

Motivation, Study Habits -- Not IQ -- Determine Growth in Math Achievement
From Science Daily: It's not how smart students are but how motivated they are and how they study that determines their growth in math achievement. That's the main finding of a new study that appears in the journal Child Development.

November 2012

Species Persistence or Extinction: Through a Mathematical Lens
From Science Daily: Scientists have estimated that there are 1.7 million species of animals, plants and algae on earth, and new species continue to be discovered. Unfortunately, as new species are found, many are also disappearing, contributing to a net decrease in biodiversity. The more diversity there is in a population, the longer the ecosystem can sustain itself. Hence, biodiversity is key to ecosystem resilience. Disease, destruction of habitats, pollution, chemical and pesticide use, increased UV-B radiation, and even the presence of new species are some of the causes for disappearing species. "Allee effect," the phenomenon by which a population's growth declines at low densities, is another key reason for perishing populations, and is an overriding feature of a paper published last month in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics.

The Aftermath of Calculator Use in College Classrooms
From Science Daily: Math instructors promoting calculator usage in college classrooms may want to rethink their teaching strategies, says Samuel King, postdoctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research & Development Center. King has proposed the need for further research regarding calculators' role in the classroom after conducting a limited study with undergraduate engineering students published in the British Journal of Educational Technology.

Supercomputing for a Superproblem: A Computational Journey Into Pure Mathematics
From Science Daily: A world-famous mathematician responsible for solving one of the subject's most challenging problems has published his latest work as a University of Leicester research report. This follows the visit that famed mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich made to the Department of Mathematics where he talked about his pioneering work. He visited UK by invitation of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Common Math Standards Supported With New Study
From Science Daily: A new study analyzing the previous math standards of each state provides strong support for adoption of common standards, which U.S. students desperately need to keep pace with their counterparts around the globe, a Michigan State University scholar argues.

Disaster Defense: Balancing Costs and Benefits
From Science Daily: Do costly seawalls provide a false sense of security in efforts to control nature? Would it be better to focus on far less expensive warning systems and improved evacuation procedures that can save many lives?

Privacy Vs. Protection: Study Considers How to Manage Epidemics in Information Blackouts
From Science Daily: When foot-and-mouth disease swept through the British countryside in early 2001, more than 10 million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered to control the disease. Despite the devastation, the disease was contained within ten months in part owing to the availability in that country of finely detailed farm data, which enabled mathematical modelers to make accurate predictions about the spread of the disease and suggest optimal ways of managing it.

Music in Our Ears: The Science of Timbre
From Science Daily: New research, published in PLOS Computational Biology, offers insight into the neural underpinnings of musical timbre. Mounya Elhilali, of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues have used mathematical models based on experiments in both animals and humans to accurately predict sound source recognition and perceptual timbre judgments by human listeners.

Computational Medicine Enhances Way Doctors Detect, Treat Disease
From Science Daily: Computational medicine, a fast-growing method of using computer models and sophisticated software to figure out how disease develops -- and how to thwart it -- has begun to leap off the drawing board and land in the hands of doctors who treat patients for heart ailments, cancer and other illnesses. Using digital tools, researchers have begun to use experimental and clinical data to build models that can unravel complex medical mysteries.

When People Worry About Math, the Brain Feels the Pain
From Science Daily: Mathematics anxiety can prompt a response in the brain similar to when a person experiences physical pain, according to new research at the University of Chicago.

October 2012

Mathematics of Leaf Decay: A Mathematical Model Reveals Commonality Within the Diversity of Leaf Decay
From Science Daily: The colorful leaves piling up in your backyard this fall can be thought of as natural stores of carbon. In the springtime, leaves soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting the gas into organic carbon compounds. Come autumn, trees shed their leaves, leaving them to decompose in the soil as they are eaten by microbes. Over time, decaying leaves release carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Traditional Courtyards: An Example of Eco-Efficiency for Architects
From Science Daily: Researchers from the University of Seville (Spain) have used mathematical tools to assess what has been known for centuries: the temperature inside the typical Mediterranean courtyard is cooler than that of the street. Though seemingly common sense, understanding such information in detail helps to save energy and money, which is the objective of eco-efficient buildings.

Formula Unlocks Secrets of Cauliflower's Geometry
From Science Daily: The laws that govern how intricate surface patterns, such as those found in the cauliflower, develop over time have been described, for the first time, by a group of European researchers.In a study published October 24, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, researchers have provided a mathematical formula to describe the processes that dictate how cauliflower-like patterns -- a type of fractal pattern -- form and develop.

Math Professor Calls Detroit Tigers a Favorite to Win World Series
From Science Daily: Since the Major League Baseball Division Series and League Championship Series have determined which teams will compete in the World Series, NJIT Math Professor Bruce Bukiet has again analyzed the probability of each team taking the title. "The Detroit Tigers have a solid advantage over the San Francisco Giants. The Tigers, who surprisingly swept the New York Yankees in four straight games in the American League Championship Series to reach the World Series, have a 58 percent chance of beating the Giants in the best of seven series," he said.

September 2012

Design Help for Drug Cocktails for HIV Patients: Mathematical Model Helps Design Efficient Multi-Drug Therapies
From Science Daily: For years, doctors treating those with HIV have recognized a relationship between how faithfully patients take the drugs they prescribe, and how likely the virus is to develop drug resistance. More recently, research has shown that the relationship between adherence to a drug regimen and resistance is different for each of the drugs that make up the "cocktail" used to control the disease.

Treating Disease by the Numbers
From Science Daily: Mathematical modeling being tested by researchers at the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and the IU School of Medicine has the potential to impact the knowledge and treatment of several diseases that continue to challenge scientists across the world.

Mathematical Model May Lead to Safer Chemotherapy
From Science Daily: Cancer chemotherapy can be a life-saver, but it is fraught with severe side effects, among them an increased risk of infection. Until now, the major criterion for assessing this risk has been the blood cell count: if the number of white blood cells falls below a critical threshold, the risk of infection is thought to be high.

Math Tree May Help Root out Fraudsters: Applying Algorithm to Social Networks Can Reveal Hidden Connections Criminals Use to Commit Fraud
From Science Daily: Fraudsters beware: the more your social networks connect you and your accomplices to the crime, the easier it will be to shake you from the tree. The Steiner tree, that is. In an article recently published in the journal Computer Fraud and Security, University of Alberta researcher Ray Patterson and colleagues from the University of Connecticut and University of California -- Merced outlined the connection linking fraud cases and the algorithm designed by Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner.

Identifying Aggressive Breast Cancers by Interpreting the Mathematical Patterns in the Cancer Genome
From Science Daily: It is now possible to identify aggressive breast cancers by interpreting the mathematical patterns in the cancer genome. Researchers at the University of Oslo, Norway (UiO) have developed a completely new method for differentiating between breast cancer patients with high and low risks of dying from the illness.

August 2012

Math Ability Requires Crosstalk in the Brain
From Science Daily: A new study by researchers at UT Dallas' Center for Vital Longevity, Duke University, and the University of Michigan has found that the strength of communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain predicts performance on basic arithmetic problems. The findings shed light on the neural basis of human math abilities and suggest a possible route to aiding those who suffer from dyscalculia-- an inability to understand and manipulate numbers.

Identifying Aggressive Breast Cancers by Interpreting the Mathematical Patterns in the Cancer Genome
From Science Daily: It is now possible to identify aggressive breast cancers by interpreting the mathematical patterns in the cancer genome.

The Bigger Question Behind "Is Algebra Necessary"
From Forbes: Mike McClenathan's excellent rebuttal on August 3, 2012 to Andrew Hacker's article "Is Algebra Necessary" which appeared in the NY Times on July 29, 2012.

Is Algebra Necessary?
From NY Times: Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York, writes this op-ed piece which appeared on the front page of the NY Times on July 29, 2012. His answer is 'no'. For a short rebuttal by Eric Friedlander, President of the American Mathematical Society, click on the link AMS Official Response.

Mathematicians Solve Decade-Old Debate On Regulation of Protein Production by microRNAs in Cells
From Science Daily: An international team of mathematicians has proposed a new solution to understanding a biological puzzle that has confounded molecular biologists. They have applied a mathematical model to work out the functioning of small molecules known as microRNAs -- components of the body akin to the electronics in modern airplanes.

Mathematicians Develop New Method for Describing Extremely Complicated Shapes
From Science Daily: Mathematicians at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey "bridged" topology and fractals and made a discovery that could lead to a new way of describing extremely complicated shapes such as the configuration of the tiniest defects in a metal or even the froth of a breaking wave.

July 2012

Future Prostate Cancer Treatments Might Be Guided by Math
From Science Daily: Scientists have designed a first draft of a mathematical model that someday could guide treatment decisions for advanced prostate cancer, in part by helping doctors predict how individual patients will respond to therapy based on the biology of their tumors.

New Mathematical Technique Allows Simulation of Noncrystalline Materials
From Science Daily: A multidisciplinary team of researchers at MIT and in Spain has found a new mathematical approach to simulating the electronic behavior of noncrystalline materials, which may eventually play an important part in new devices including solar cells, organic LED lights and printable, flexible electronic circuits.

Simple Mathematcal Pattern Describes Shape of Neuron 'Jungle'
From Science Daily: Neurons come in an astounding assortment of shapes and sizes, forming a thick inter-connected jungle of cells. Now, University College London neuroscientists have found that there is a simple pattern that describes the tree-like shape of all neurons.

Math Formula Leads Researchers to Source of Pollution
From Science Daily: The leaking of environmentally damaging pollutants into our waters and atmosphere could soon be counteracted by a simple mathematical algorithm, according to researchers.

Scientists Struggle With Mathematical Details, Study by Biologists Finds
From Science Daily: Many people remember struggling with maths at school, but few of us would expect that professional scientists suffer from a similar problem in their daily work. A new study by biologists at the University of Bristol shows that scientists tend to overlook their colleagues' research if it is packed full of mathematical equations.

Remapping Gang Turf: Math Model Used for Mapping Chimp Territories Applies
From Science Daily: A mathematical model that has been used for more than 80 years to determine the hunting range of animals in the wild holds promise for mapping the territories of street gangs, a UCLA-led team of social scientists reports in a new study.

Math Experts Question Key Ecological Theory
From Science Daily: Mathematicians at the University of York in the UK and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand say they have disproved a widely accepted theory underpinning the operation of complex networks of interactions in the natural world.

Suburban Students Outpace Rural and Urban Peers in Math
From Science Daily: American students living in the suburbs are outpacing their urban and rural counterparts in mathematics achievement, with Asian and white students scoring the highest among all races and ethnicities, and students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds doing better overall, according to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

Citizen Science: Study Allows Thousands to Test 'Gut Sense' for Numbers
From Science Daily: A first-of-its kind study using the World Wide Web to collect data from more than 10,000 study subjects ages 11 to 85 found that humans' inborn "number sense" improves during school years, declines during old age, and remains linked throughout the entire lifespan to academic mathematics achievement.

Ability to Estimate Quantity Increases in First 30 Years of Life
From Science Daily: One of the basic elements of cognition¯the ability to estimate quantities¯grows more precise across the first 30 years or more of a person's life, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Civil Engineers Find Savings Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Stiffer Roads Reduce Fuel Consumption
From Science Daily: A new study by civil engineers at MIT shows that using stiffer pavements on the nation's roads could reduce vehicle fuel consumption by as much as 3 percent -- a savings that could add up to 273 million barrels of crude oil per year, or $15.6 billion at today's oil prices. This would result in an accompanying annual decrease in CO2 emissions of 46.5 million metric tons.

June 2012

Proficiency in Math is a Crucial Requirement for Most Well-Paying Jobs
From Science Daily: From factory workers to Wall Street bankers, a reasonable proficiency in math is a crucial requirement for most well-paying jobs in a modern economy. Yet, over the past 30 years, mathematics achievement of U.S. high school students has remained stagnant -- and significantly behind many other countries, including China, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada.

Quantum Computers Could Help Search Engines Keep Up With the Internet's Growth
From Science Daily: Behind the scenes, a lot of math goes into figuring out exactly what qualifies as most relevant web page for your search. Google, for example, uses a page ranking algorithm that is rumored to be the largest numerical calculation carried out anywhere in the world. With the web constantly expanding, researchers at USC have proposed -- and demonstrated the feasibility -- of using quantum computers to speed up that process.

Driving Without a Blind Spot May Be Closer Than It Appears
From Science Daily: A side mirror that eliminates the dangerous "blind spot" for drivers has now received a U.S. patent. The subtly curved mirror, invented by Drexel University mathematics professor Dr. R. Andrew Hicks, dramatically increases the field of view with minimal distortion.

Predicting Burglary Patterns Through Math Modeling of Crime
From Science Daily: Pattern formation in physical, biological, and sociological systems has been studied for many years. Despite the fact that these subject areas are completely diverse, the mathematics that describes underlying patterns in these systems can be surprisingly similar. Mathematical tools can be used to study such systems and predict their patterns.

May 2012

Invisibility, Once the Subject of Magic or Legend, is Slowly Becoming Reality
From Science Daily: Over the past five years mathematicians and other scientists have been working on devices that enable invisibility cloaks -- perhaps not yet concealing Harry Potter, but at least shielding small objects from detection by microwaves or sound waves.

Math Predicts Size of Clot-Forming Cells
From Science Daily: UC Davis mathematicians have helped biologists figure out why platelets, the cells that form blood clots, are the size and shape that they are. Because platelets are important both for healing wounds and in strokes and other conditions, a better understanding of how they form and behave could have wide implications.

Freezing liquids help to predict properties of prime numbers
From Phys.org: ...Dr Fyodorov explained: "The prime numbers are the elements, or building blocks, of arithmetic. Our work provides evidence for a surprising connection between the primes and freezing in certain complex materials in Physics."

Math Can Save Tylenol Overdose Patients
From The University of Utah: University of Utah mathematicians developed a set of calculus equations to make it easier for doctors to save Tylenol overdose patients by quickly estimating how much painkiller they took, when they consumed it and whether they will require a liver transplant to survive.

The Mighty Mathematician You've (Probably) Never Heard Of
From The New York Times: Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether.

New Twist On Ancient Math Problem Could Improve Medicine, Microelectronics
From Science Daily: A hidden facet of a math problem that goes back to Sanskrit scrolls has just been exposed by nanotechnology researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut.

Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash
From BBC News Magazine: It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world.

Mathematics: First-Ever Image of a Flat Torus in 3-D
From Science Daily: Just as a terrestrial globe cannot be flattened without distorting the distances, it seemed impossible to visualize abstract mathematical objects called flat tori in ordinary three-dimensional space. However, a team of mathematicians and computer scientists has succeeded in constructing and visually representing an image of a flat torus in three-dimensional space. This is a smooth fractal, halfway between fractals and ordinary surfaces.

April 2012

Study Finds Twist to the Story of the Number Line: Number Line Is Learned, Not Innate Human Intuition
From Science Daily: Tape measures. Rulers. Graphs. The gas gauge in your car, and the icon on your favorite digital device showing battery power. The number line and its cousins -- notations that map numbers onto space and often represent magnitude -- are everywhere. Most adults in industrialized societies are so fluent at using the concept, we hardly think about it. We don't stop to wonder: Is it "natural"? Is it cultural?

Shedding Light On Southpaws: Sports Data Help Confirm Theory Explaining Left-Handed Minority in General Population
From Science Daily: Lefties have always been a bit of a puzzle. Representing only 10 percent of the general human population, left-handers have been viewed with suspicion and persecuted across history. The word "sinister" even derives from "left or left-hand."

Countries That Best Prepare Math Teachers Share Similarities: Several Key Conditions Generally Lacking in US
From Science Daily: Countries that best prepare math teachers meet several key conditions generally lacking in the United States, according to the first international study of what teacher preparation programs are able to accomplish.

Can Mathematics Help Usain Bolt Run Faster?
From Science Daily: Usain Bolt can achieve faster running times with no extra effort on his part or improvement to his fitness, according to a study published today in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Sciences John D. Barrow illustrates how, based on concrete mathematical evidence, Bolt can cut his world record from 9.58 seconds to 9.45.

March 2012

Mathematician Publishes 2012 Major League Baseball Projections
From Science Daily: The Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Diamondbacks should win their divisions, while the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds will make it to Major League Baseball's post-season as wild card teams in the National League (NL) in 2012, according to NJIT's baseball guru Bruce Bukiet. For more than a decade, Bukiet, an associate professor and associate dean, has applied mathematical analysis to compute the number of regular season games each Major League Baseball team should win.

Physicists Explain the Collective Motion of Particles Called Fermions
From Science Daily: Some people like company. Others prefer to be alone. The same holds true for the particles that constitute the matter around us: Some, called bosons, like to act in unison with others. Others, called fermions, have a mind of their own. Different as they are, both species can show "collective" behavior -- an effect similar to the wave at a baseball game, where all spectators carry out the same motion regardless of whether they like each other.

Bacteria Use Chat to Play the 'Prisoner's Dilemma' Game in Deciding Their Fate
From Science Daily: When faced with life-or-death situations, bacteria -- and maybe even human cells -- use an extremely sophisticated version of "game theory" to consider their options and decide upon the best course of action, scientists reported in San Diego March 27. In a presentation at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they said microbes "play" a version of the classic "Prisoner's Dilemma" game.

Computer Model of Spread of Dementia Can Predict Future Disease Patterns Years Before They Occur in a Patient
From Science Daily: Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have developed a computer program that has tracked the manner in which different forms of dementia spread within a human brain. They say their mathematical model can be used to predict where and approximately when an individual patient's brain will suffer from the spread, neuron to neuron, of "prion-like" toxic proteins -- a process they say underlies all forms of dementia.

Mathematical Methods Predicts Movement of Oil and Ash Following Environmental Disasters
From Science Daily: Mathematical methods help predict the movement of oil and ash following environmental disasters.

Partnerships in the Brain: Mathematical Model Describes the Collaboration of Individual Neurons
From Science Daily: How do neurons in the brain communicate with each other? One common theory suggests that individual cells do not exchange signals among each other, but rather that exchange takes place between groups of cells. Researchers from Japan, the United States and Germany have now developed a mathematical model that can be used to test this assumption.

Escaping Parasites and Pathogens
From Science Daily: In nature, how do host species survive parasite attacks? This has not been well understood, until now. A new mathematical model shows that when a host and its parasite each have multiple traits governing their interaction, the host has a unique evolutionary advantage that helps it survive.

First Computer Model of How Buds Grow Into Leaves
From Science Daily: Leaves come in all shapes and sizes. Scientists have discovered simple rules that control leaf shape during growth. Using this 'recipe', they have developed the first computer model able to accurately emulate leaf growth from a bud.

February 2012

How the Tiger Got its Stripes: Proving Turing's Tiger Stripe Theory
From Science Daily: Researchers from King's College London have provided the first experimental evidence confirming a great British mathematician's theory of how biological patterns such as tiger stripes or leopard spots are formed.

Predicting System Crashes in Nature and Society
From Science Daily: The world can deliver sudden and nasty shocks. Economies can crash, fisheries can collapse, and climates can pass tipping points. Providing early warning of such changes currently requires the collection of enormous and often prohibitive amounts of data. A new method developed by....

US lag in science, math a disaster in the making
From CNN: Almost everyone, from educators to government officials to industry experts, laments the lackluster abilities and performance of our nations' students in science, technology, engineering and math (know as STEM education).

Fall of Communism Changed Mathematics in US
From Science Daily: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 brought an influx of Soviet mathematicians to U.S. institutions, and those scholars' differing areas of specialization have changed the way math is studied and taught in this country....

January 2012

Want Better Math Teachers? Then Train Them Better
From Science Daily: It's time for the United States to consider establishing higher standards for math teachers if the nation is going to break its "vicious cycle" of mediocrity.

Inconsistent math curricula hurting US students, study finds
From Science Daily: A new study finds important differences in math curricula across US states and school districts. The findings suggest that many students across the country are placed at a disadvantage by less demanding curricula.

Robot biologist solves complex problem from scratch
From Science Daily: First it was chess. Then it was Jeopardy. Now computers are at it again....

Mathematician claims breakthrough in Sudoku puzzle
From Nature: Puzzles must have at least 17 clues to have valid solution.

The mathematics behind the new Sherlock Holmes movie
From New Scientist: Sherlock Holmes averts a world war using mathematics in the new movie Game of Shadows.

December 2011

The Khan Academy: Online Learning, Personalized
From The New York Times: Salman Khan, a 35-year-old Ivy League-trained math whiz has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.

Newton's Personal Notebooks Go Digital
From Cambridge University: The Cambridge Digital Library recently published 4,000 pages of Isaac Newton's personal papers.

Graphing Functionality Now Available on Google Search
From the MAA Mathematical Sciences Digital Library: Now you can plot mathematical functions right on the search result page. Just type in a function and you'll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.

Data and Power
From Popular Science: Popular Science has published a special issue that looks at the transformative effects of the data deluge on our lives and how we got there.

The Math Behind Screening Tests
From Scientific American: What a positive test really means.