I noticed an irrepressible smile on my face as I listened to Peter Sarnak’s lecture in a complex analysis class I took in graduate school. I tried to account for the pleasure I felt about ideas I could just barely comprehend. It seemed I understood the significance of the exploration, that these abstractions were discerning […]
|
|||||
|
Even students of mathematics rarely have the opportunity to explore the kind of thinking that leads to ground-breaking achievements in their discipline. I was struck, very recently, by how students in my calculus class would not likely reflect on how it was possible that the tedious arithmetic they were doing (solving equations involving clumsy fractions […] I wrote not too long ago about the recording of the aftermath of particle collisions in ongoing high energy physics experiments. The post took note of the imaginative management of uncertainties (quantum mechanical uncertainties, measurement uncertainties and statistical errors). This hotbed of uncertainties is disentangled with the mathematics of probability. Mathematics here is being used […] The hoopla about Hawking’s new book made it frustratingly clear that there’s a real impasse in the centuries-old debate over whether science, and its intrinsic rationality, can or should definitively dispute religious ideas. The impasse is, I believe, a consequence of our not seeing the elephant in the room, namely ourselves. The debate proceeds, as […] I was impressed when my husband, who participates in one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, first recounted the discovery of the top quark at the Tevatron Particle Accelerator in Batavia, Illinois. He told me about it shortly after we met, in the summer of 1998. I had already read some […] |
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2024 Mathematics Rising - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||
Recent Comments