Here’s a great real world example of why math is important kids! From the Wall Street Journal:
Scientists using a powerful mathematical tool previously applied to the stock market have identified an Achilles heel in HIV that could be a prime target for AIDS vaccines or drugs.
The research adds weight to a provocative hypothesis—that an HIV vaccine should avoid a broadside attack and instead home in on a few targets…
A new theory of relativity — from a twelve-year-old?!? The Daily Mail reports that young Jake Barnett has “embarked on his most ambitious project yet – his own ‘expanded version of Einstein’s theory of relativity’” Here’s a video of the little genius explaining some of the finer points of calculus, with some of the Mail‘s story below:
I wonder what the first person to win two Nobel prizes, Madame Curie, would make of this study. Oh, I know the answer from a classic Simpsons episode … Stephanie Pappas writes on LiveScience:
Getting the once-over from a man causes women to score lower on a math test, a new study finds.
Despite this drop in performance, women were more motivated to interact with men who ogled them, perhaps because they were trying to boost their sense of belonging, psychologists report in the February issue of the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
“It creates this vicious cycle for women in which they’re underperforming in math or work domains, but they’re continuing to want to interact with the person who is making them underperform in the first place,” study researcher Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told LiveScience.
Danger, indeed. Aidan Jones writes on Discover:
To seal more car deals, Chevrolet UK looked to arm its salesmen with the perfect weapon of confidence: an unstoppable handshake. Here’s the secret they received from Geoffrey Beattie, Head of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester:
PH (Perfect Handshake) = √ (e^2 + ve^2)(d^2) + (cg + dr)^2 + π{(4^2)(4^2)}^2 + (vi + t + te)^2 + {(4^2 )(4^2)}^2
We hope (and suspect) the training posters and equation, supposedly meant for Chevrolet-sellers, are meant for publicity and are not a real attempt to improve customer relations…
After I posted an article about technical analysis – an investment method that looks for patterns in the stock market – a couple people commented that it reminded them of the film Pi, about a renegade mathematician somehow using Pi to search for patters in the stock market with a homemade supercomputer in his crummy Manhatten apartment.
Technical analysis was probably the inspiration for the stock market portion of the film, but did you know that the part about renegade mathematicians building supercomputers in their living rooms to calculate Pi is actually based on a true story? Aronofsky almost certainly took the inspiration from a 1992 New Yorker story about the Brothers Chudnovsky.… Read the rest
Marc Abrahams for the Guardian:
Indian scientists wield sophisticated mathematics to dissect and analyse the traditional meditation chanting sound ‘Om’
Two Indian scientists are wielding sophisticated mathematics to dissect and analyse the traditional meditation chanting sound “Om”. The Om team has published six monographs in academic journals. These plumb certain acoustic subtleties of Om, which these researchers say is “the divine sound”.
Om has many variations. In a study published in the International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, the researchers explain: “It may be very fast, several cycles per second. Or it may be slower, several seconds for each cycling of [the] Om mantra. Or it might become extremely slow, with the mmmmmm sound continuing in the mind for much longer periods but still pulsing at that slow rate. It is somewhat like one of these vibrations:
‘OMmmOMmmOMmm…
‘OMmmmmOMmmmmOMmmmm…
‘OMmmmmmmmOMmmmmmmmOMmm’…
From renegade scholar Randall Carlson, he takes the viewer through the relationship of Sacred Geometry in Time and Space and it’s manifestation of the phenomenon of the Precession of The Equinoxes (POE). The POE cosmic time cycle presents the frame work for understanding the cosmic cycles of destruction and rebirth.
Not only is Grigori Perelman turning down a $1 million prize for solving one of the world’s hardest math problems, he is giving up math for a life of table tennis. 
From the Huffington Post:
Dr Grigori Perelman, a reclusive Russian genius, is refusing to accept the prestigious $1 million “Millennium” mathematics prize awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, MA.
Perelman was awarded the prize for solving the one-hundred-year-old Poincaré conjecture, one of the most complicated mathematical problems in the world – so complex, in fact, that after Perelman posted his proofs in 2002 it took several years for other experts to confirm he was correct.
Perelman has apparently given up on mathematics, dismayed at the intellectual and moral failings of his peers. Instead, according to reports, he likes to play table tennis against a wall in his apartment. “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms,” he told a journalist who managed to get in touch with him.
Via LiveLeak:
