Video on OR

Georgia Tech Professor David Goldsman's video about operations research. Hat tip: Punk Rock Operations Research.

Christianity and science

Returning to a topic often covered here: The October, 2011, issue of First Things has an article by James Hannam entitled Modern Science’s Christian Sources. The article provides more arguments about how Christianity did not impede the growth of science but instead provided the conditions necessary for it to start, and Hannam focuses on showing how two key myths are false: (1) "science has advanced by fighting religious superstition and making the world safe for rational inquiry" and (2) "Westerners only picked up the baton from the ancient Greeks, or, as has been more recently alleged, the Islamic caliphate." Some highlights:

Science as we imagine it today—with laboratories, experiments, and a professional culture—did not appear until the nineteenth century, but its origins can be found much earlier, in the period commonly known as the “scientific revolution.” And the “scientific revolution” was a continuation of developments that started deep in the Middle Ages among people whose scientific work expressed their religious belief.

With the exception of mathematics, in medieval Europe things were different. Aristotle’s faulty method was struck down by the Catholic Church, allowing previously forbidden ideas to flourish. The Church also made natural philosophy a compulsory part of the courses it required trainee theologians to follow. So, science held a central place in Christian centers of learning that it did not hold in Islamic madrassas. And Christianity itself provided a worldview especially compatible with experimental science.

Christianity made science a theologically justified and even righteous path to pursue. Since God created the world, exploring how it works honors its Creator.

Punk Rock Operations Research

Laura McLay's blog on operations research.

2011 Baseball predictions

Bruce Bukiet used a mathematical model to predict the number of wins of every team in the major leagues.

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code describes a statistician in Toronto who figured out how to buy only winning lottery tickets.

Greatest Mathematicians

A list of the Top 10 Greatest Mathematicians.

Via First Thoughts.

The Probability of God

British theoretical physicist Stephen Urwin uses Bayes' Theorem to model belief in the existence of God.

See also the post at First Things.

The quantity D is the ratio of two probabilities; in particular, D equals the probability that the evidence occurs given that God exists divided by the probability that the evidence occurs given that God doesn't exist. Of course, these probabilities are subjective probabilities.

Curling and operations research

We've watched a good bit of curling during the Winter Olympics, and I keep thinking that one could apply operations research to make better decisions in a game.

Apparently I'm not the first: see the article by Kostuk and Willoughby on a long-running dispute in curling.

Monopoly games never end

Some Monopoly games never end. Some folks at Cornell have explained why and estimated the probability that a game will never end as approximately 12 percent.

Is God a Mathematician?

Is God a Mathematician? is the title of a new book by Mario Livio. I was just reading a review of this book in the February issue of First Things when a student who works at NIST sent me a note that he had heard Livio give a talk there. He encouraged me to attend Livio's talk at the University of Maryland, which was held late on Friday afternoon, January 30, at one of the large physics lecture halls. There was someone there selling Livio's book.

So I did attend the first half of it (before I went home for dinner). Interestingly, the review that I had read gave me an excellent preview, for Livio started by stating that the title question is more important than the answer. Then he mentioned some highlights in the history of mathematics, including Kepler, Newton, Kelvin's knots, and Penrose's three worlds (physical, mental, and mathematical; described in Shadows of the Mind). He discussed the question of whether mathematics is invention or discovery, Plato, Archimedes (the world's first applied mathematician), Galileo, and Descartes.

Traffic in Tyson's Corner

Traffic is bad in this area, without doubt. It is especially bad in Tyson's Corner. An October 24 article in the Washington Post stated that the Tyson's Corner lunchtime rush “surpasses the morning rush by 24 percent.”

How did they get that statistic? See the
chart of traffic in Tyson's Corner.

You will notice that they define a lunch “rush hour” that is 25
percent longer than the morning rush hour (2 1/2 hours versus 2 hours).


However, the traffic rate (cars per hour) is almost the same. Dividing the total number of cars by the duration of the rush hour yields 9,359 cars per hour between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., and 9,268 cars per hour between 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. The evening rush also has the same rate: 9,343 cars per hour between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.

The Role of the Professor

A colleague recently sent me a copy of The Role of the Professor, by Professor Mark Noll, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University. (The unpublished essay is from 1992, when I was in the middle of graduate school.) As Noll writes, "This essay is intended not only to help professors better understand their own role, but also to help the public at large better appreciate this role."

Noll distinguishes between the professor, the teacher, and the professor. The teacher focuses on the student and helps the student learn. The researcher focuses on discovering new results and creating new knowledge. The professor focuses on the subject:

The professor's focus, on the other hand, is on understanding, gaining insight into, judging the significance of, and organizing old knowledge. He is disturbed by the pile-up of undigested and ill-understood new results. He is not happy until he has been able to fit these results into a larger context. He is happy if he can find a new conceptual framework with which to unify and simplify the results that have been found by the researcher.

This is certainly what, on the good days, makes my job so interesting, and it is the ideal to which we should strive. Noll goes on to discuss the administrator's emphasis on teaching and research and the lack of interest in the synthesis and understanding he clearly values.

Silver Dollars

Here is a math problem for you, from the 1971 edition of Polya's How to Solve It, a classic on mathematical problem-solving:

Bob has ten pockets and 44 silver dollars. He wants to put his dollars into his pockets so distributed that each pocket contains a different number of dollars. Can he do so?