If The Story is Good Enough They Will ALL Listen

One of the main reasons I got into podcasting was because I was interested in the stories behind mathematics. I have approached this in a few different ways with the podcasts. With Combinations and Permutations we cover a specific topic and in between the tangential conversational strands and crazy non sequiturs I try to make sure that the story of the topic, be it a mathematician, a problem, or a discipline, comes out. With Strongly Connected Components I am more than anything else there to find out the story of the person I am interviewing , the story of why they do and the story of what they do. The story has been the most important way of making humans understand the world around them for the longest time and I think it may be the way to once again make people engage with the sciences and mathematics, if we can make our story interesting enough people will pay attention again and, not only that, they will want to understand. I am not the only person who thinks this thankfully; Randy Olson, in The Scientist, recently wrote an article entitled Tell Me A Story of Science discussing this very topic. From the article:

But maybe you’ll say, “Storytelling is just for fiction.” Sorry, but that’s not true. This is a shortcoming of today’s science education—the failure to make scientists realize they are storytellers, every bit as much as novelists. They just don’t like to admit it, or really even think about it. They tend to think stories mean Star Wars and Harry Potter. The truth is, stories are as equally important in nonfiction as fiction. They are the way we understand our world.

The Beauty of the Fourier

Thanks to twitter I stumbled upon a beautiful Fast Fourier Transform video, here it is:

Fast Fourier Transform from peter menich on Vimeo.

In case you want to know some more about Fourier Transforms, Larry Hardesty from MIT has a really nice Explained article on them:

In 1811, Joseph Fourier, the 43-year-old prefect of the French district of Isère, entered a competition in heat research sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences. The paper he submitted described a novel analytical technique that we today call the Fourier transform, and it won the competition; but the prize jury declined to publish it, criticizing the sloppiness of Fourier’s reasoning. According to Jean-Pierre Kahane, a French mathematician and current member of the academy, as late as the early 1970s, Fourier’s name still didn’t turn up in the major French encyclopedia the Encyclopædia Universalis.

Now, however, his name is everywhere. The Fourier transform is a way to decompose a signal into its constituent frequencies, and versions of it are used to generate and filter cell-phone and Wi-Fi transmissions, to compress audio, image, and video files so that they take up less bandwidth, and to solve differential equations, among other things. It’s so ubiquitous that “you don’t really study the Fourier transform for what it is,” says Laurent Demanet, an assistant professor of applied mathematics at MIT. “You take a class in signal processing, and there it is. You don’t have any choice.”(Rest of the Article)

Sorry, but Tryptophan is More Important

As I am sure that most, but probably not all, of you know it is thanksgiving week here in the US. The week where we all decide to test the tnesile strenth of our pant’s waistbands and try to integrate the curve of a turkey in order to make sure we have enough meat to feed everyone. For me this is a big family holiday so I am about to hop on a plane and fly east for a few hours so that I can spend it with them. The reason that I happen to be telling all of you this is that it means that there will be no Strongly Connected Components or Combinations and Permutations this week. I am sorry for any inconvenience this happens to cause any of you, but family, and tryptophan, comes first. Thanks for your understanding and I can’t wait to get back to you with more great audio about mathematics.

4 Billion Dolalrs for Math and Science, I say Yes Please

There is more information available for the Obama Administrations “Race to the Top” to help better fund math and science education. The real kicker to this information is a pledge of over 4 billion dollars for this boost to math and science education. The money alone will not be enough but if used correctly and applied in inspired ways it really could help the USA regain some of its lost standing as an innovator and creator of science. From a ComputerWorld article on the “Race to the Top”:

Obama is seeking to improve math and science education through a number of initiatives, the largest of which is a $4.35 billion for the “Race to the Top” fund announced this month.

The money, which comes from the $787 billion stimulus, is designed to create incentives for schools that develop science, technology, and engineering and mathematics programs, known collectively as STEM subjects.

Among the things the White House will do to encourage students is to hold an annual science fair that will bring together winners of science fair contest nationally. Obama said students who design the best experiment, hardware or software deserve the same recognition that athletes receive. (ComputerWorld via IntMath)

And The World is Still Here

Huge, and fantastic, news: The LHC has had COLLISIONS.

Geneva, 23 Nov (THAINDIAN NEWS) Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb

I wish to also point out that no black hole was created that swallowed us up and the earth did not just explode, in other words the LHC did not kill us. YAY!