Natural Blogarithms

From an article by Mary Ann Bragg which appeared on CapeCodeOnline and was also printed in this month’s College Mathematics Journal:
TRURO — Voters narrowly approved one of four zoning amendments late Tuesday night at the annual town meeting. But town officials were still looking at the exact vote count on that article yesterday.
In a vote [...]

Well over two years ago on this blog (have I really been around that long?), I posted a link to a story that Sudoku had been solved.  (The original link to the Math-Forge Story is broken, so here in alternative version of the story.) While just about every computer scientist and programmer I know [...]

In my Fall course of Math Models, I have three groups working on projects to finish up the semester.  One of the groups have an assignment to explore a model of the spread of a forest fire.  The assumptions are that the trees are on a rectangular grid, or a lattice.  The time is a [...]

A good read from the San Francisco Chronicle:  Algebra – it’s everywhere by Jill Tucker.
Algebra, says Devlin, is a language, a very precise language written in symbols, and it’s everywhere: in nearly all electronic devices, every statistic and each Internet search engine – and, indeed, in every train leaving Boston.
"You can store information using it. [...]

I have a calculator.  I can answer all the math problems I’ll ever need because I own a calculator.  There are many people that worry me when they say they were never any good at math: the nurse administering the medication, the clerk counting my change, the broker managing my investments, the salesman offering me [...]

I received an email earlier to day trying to promote some sort of a boycott of Exxon/Mobile Mobil gasoline stations in an effort to force them to lower their gas prices. Recognizing that there are few around my neck of the woods, I didn’t pay much attention to the email. Plus, I [...]

Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia has recently published a paper in the February issue of Astrobiology entitled Implications of an anthropic model of evolution for emergence of complex life and intelligence. In this article he argues that a number of limitations must be overcome in order for evolution to progress [...]

Philip Stark, a statistician at UC Berkeley, has been able to provide a more reliable technique for performing recounts of close elections.  As technology has entered into the voting realm, different kinds of errors have crept into the election system.  Based on election results, certain forms of recounts will undoubtedly need to be performed.  Hand [...]

Mathematicians at the University of Exeter in England model traffic jams based on the cascading effect of driver responses to the brake lights in front of them.  Not only does the mathematical model answer questions about why traffic can creep to a stop without any accident or obstruction, but it may also lead to better [...]

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