Fri 16 Apr 2010
Mathematics in the news: New York Times blog
Posted by Jeanine Meyer under mathematics in the news1 Comment
Mathematics is in the news all the time! Please feel free to make a comment/reply when you come across something of interest.
For your entertainment and education, please check out Steven Strogatz’s blog on topics in mathematics. Here is one on calculus:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/change-we-can-believe-in/?scp=1&sq=Calculus&st=cse
There is a hint that this may be the last one, on the Hilbert Hotel: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/the-hilbert-hotel/?hp
The Cantor diagonalization argument is similar to ones I will be showing in the Computability course.
This column continues to be good reading. The last issue is on presentation and calculation of probabilities, and how many people, including doctors, do not understand and properly convey to their patients the probabilities involved in testing. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/chances-are/?pagemode=print
The calculation described here is sometimes called a 2 by 2 analysis: calculation of the true positives, false positives, true negatives and false negatives.