 The Mathematical Moments program promotes appreciation and understanding of the role mathematics plays in science, nature, technology, and human culture.Primary Format :
Language :
Also Listed as:
City :
State/Province :
Country :
Region :
User Tags:
User Votes:
 RSS Feed
Website
People found this Podcast
Searching for:
View this Podcast on a Google Map. 
 Text Only listing of Mathematical Moments Podcasts
 Methings.com listings of Mathematical Moments Podcasts
If you like this podcast, you might also like:
|
View the full archive of Mathematical Moments
Resisting the Spread of Disease - Part 1One of the most useful tools in analyzing the spread of disease is a system of
evolutionary equations that reflects the dynamics among three distinct categories
of a population: those susceptible (S) to a disease, those infected (I) with
it, and those recovered (R) from it. This SIR model is applicable to a range of
diseases, from smallpox to the flu. To predict the impact of a particular disease it
is crucial to determine certain parameters associated with it, such as the average
number of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Resisting the Spread of Disease - Part 2One of the most useful tools in analyzing the spread of disease is a system of
evolutionary equations that reflects the dynamics among three distinct categories
of a population: those susceptible (S) to a disease, those infected (I) with
it, and those recovered (R) from it. This SIR model is applicable to a range of
diseases, from smallpox to the flu. To predict the impact of a particular disease it
is crucial to determine certain parameters associated with it, such as the average
number of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Predicting Climate - Part 1What’s in store for our climate and us? It’s an extraordinarily complex quesÂtion whose answer requires physics, chemistry, earth science, and mathematics (among other subjects) along with massive computing power. Mathematicians use partial differential equations to model the movement of the atmosphere; dynamical systems to describe the feedback between land, ocean, air, and ice; and statistics to quantify the uncertainty of current projections. Although there is some discrepancy among ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Predicting Climate - Part 2What’s in store for our climate and us? It’s an extraordinarily complex quesÂtion whose answer requires physics, chemistry, earth science, and mathematics (among other subjects) along with massive computing power. Mathematicians use partial differential equations to model the movement of the atmosphere; dynamical systems to describe the feedback between land, ocean, air, and ice; and statistics to quantify the uncertainty of current projections. Although there is some discrepancy among ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Matching Vital Needs - Increasing the number of live-donor kidney transplantsA person needing a kidney transplant may have a friend or relative who volunteers
to be a living donor, but whose kidney is incompatible, forcing the person to wait for a transplant from a deceased donor. In the U.S. alone, thousands of people die each year without ever finding a suitable kidney. A new technique applies graph theory to groups of incompatible patient-donor pairs to create the largest possible number of paired-donation exchanges. These exchanges, in which a donor paired with ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Pulling Out (from) All the Stops - Visiting all of NY's subway stops in record time
With 468 stops served by 26 lines, the New York subway system can make visitors
feel lucky when they successfully negotiate one planned trip in a day. Yet
these two New Yorkers, Chris Solarz and Matt Ferrisi, took on the task of
breaking a world record by visiting every stop in the system in less than 24 hours.
They used mathematics, especially graph theory, to narrow down the possible
routes to a manageable number and subdivided the problem to find the best
routes in small ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Working It Out. Math solves a mystery about the opening of "A Hard Day's Night."The music of most hit songs is pretty well known, but sometimes there are
mysteries. One question that remained unanswered for over forty years is: What
instrumentation and notes make up the opening chord of the Beatles’ "A Hard
Day’s Night"? Mathematician Jason Brown - a big Beatles fan - recently solved the
puzzle using his musical knowledge and discrete Fourier transforms, mathematical
transformations that help decompose signals into their basic parts.
These transformations simplify ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Getting It TogetherThe collective motion of many groups of animals can be stunning. Flocks of birds
and schools of fish are able to remain cohesive, find food, and avoid predators without
leaders and without awareness of all but a few other members in their groups.
Research using vector analysis and statistics has led to the discovery of simple principles,
such as members maintaining a minimum distance between neighbors while
still aligning with them, which help explain shapes such as the one below.
Althoug ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Improving Stents - Part 1Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood
vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing
vessels and keeping them open so that blood can flow freely. When stents
work, they are a great alternative to radical surgery, but they can deteriorate or
become dislodged. Mathematical models of blood vessels and stents are helping
to determine better shapes and materials for the tubes. These models are so
accurate that the FDA is cons ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Improving Stents - Part 2Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood
vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing
vessels and keeping them open so that blood can flow freely. When stents
work, they are a great alternative to radical surgery, but they can deteriorate or
become dislodged. Mathematical models of blood vessels and stents are helping
to determine better shapes and materials for the tubes. These models are so
accurate that the FDA is cons ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Restoring Genius - Discovering lost works of Archimedes - Part 1Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his works were erased and the cleaned pages were used again. One of those written-over works (called a palimpsest) has resurfaced, and advanced digital imaging techniques using statistics and linear algebra have revealed his previously unknown discoveries in combinatorics and calculus. This leads to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Restoring Genius - Discovering lost works of Archimedes - Part 2Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his works were erased and the cleaned pages were used again. One of those written-over works (called a palimpsest) has resurfaced, and advanced digital imaging techniques using statistics and linear algebra have revealed his previously unknown discoveries in combinatorics and calculus. This leads to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Steering Towards EfficiencyThe racing team is just as important to a car’s finish as the driver is. With little to
separate competitors over hundreds of laps, teams search for any technological
edge that will propel them to Victory Lane. Of special use today is computational
fluid dynamics, which is used to predict airflow over a car, both alone and in relation
to other cars (for example, when drafting). Engineers also rely on more basic
subjects, such as calculus and geometry, to improve their cars. In fact, one rac ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Making Movies Come AliveMany movie animation techniques are based on mathematics. Characters,
background, and motion are all created using software that combines pixels
into geometric shapes which are stored and manipulated using the mathematics
of computer graphics.
Software encodes features that are important to the eye, like position,
motion, color, and texture, into each pixel. The software uses vectors,
matrices, and polygonal approximations to curved surfaces to determine the
shade of each pixel. Each fram ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Targeting TumorsDetection and treatment of cancer have progressed, but neither is as precise as
doctors would like. For example, tumors can change shape or location between
pre-operative diagnosis and treatment so that radiation is aimed at a target which
may have moved. Geometry, partial differential equations, and integer linear
programming are three areas of mathematics used to process data in real-time,
which allows doctors to inflict maximum damage to the tumor, with minimum
damage to healthy tissue.
... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Predicting Storm SurgeStorm surge is often the most devastating part of a hurricane. Mathematical models used to predict surge must incorporate the effects of winds, atmospheric pressure, tides, waves and river flows, as well as the geometry and topography of the coastal ocean and the adjacent floodplain. Equations from fluid dynamics describe the movement of water, but most often such huge systems of equations need to be solved by numerical analysis in order to better forecast where potential
flooding will occu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Pinpointing StyleMathematics is not just numbers and brute force calculation there is considerable art and elegance to the subject. So it is natural that mathematics is now being used to analyze artists. styles and to help determine the identities of the creators of disputed works. Attempts at measuring style began with literature based on statistics of word use and have successfully identified disputed works such as some of The Federalist Papers. But drawings and paintings resisted quantification until ver ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Putting Music on the MapMathematics and music have long been closely associated. Now a recent mathematical
breakthrough uses topology (a generalization of geometry) to represent musical chords as points in a space called an orbifold, which twists and folds back on itself much like a Möbius strip does. This representation makes sense musically in that sounds that are far apart in one sense yet similar in another, such as two notes that are an octave apart, are identified in the space.This latest insight provides a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Finding Fake PhotosActually, they weren’t caught together at all their images were put together with software. The shadows cast by the stars’ faces give it away: The sun is coming from two different directions on the same beach! More elaborate digital doctoring is detected with mathematics. Calculus, linear algebra, and statistics are especially useful in determining when a portion of one image has been copied to another or when part of an image has been replaced.
Tampering with an image leaves statistical ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Folding for Fun and FunctionOrigami paper-folding may not seem like a subject for mathematical investigation
or one with sophisticated applications, yet anyone who has tried to fold a
road map or wrap a present knows that origami is no trivial matter.
Mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers have recently discovered that
this centuries-old subject can be used to solve many modern problems.The
methods of origami are now used to fold objects such as automobile air bags
and huge space telescopes efficiently, an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
|
