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It turned out to be a beautiful day, temp hit 70, and I got the urge to ride the little motorscooter. Coming home, I pulled into Taco Bell. I sat in the driveway for several minutes with no results, then pulled around to the window. I waited there, watching 2 girls drag wet rags around on the counters, and finally, one of them noticed me. I gave her my order, she vanished into the rear if the store, and the manager appeared, almost gnashing his teeth. I gave him my order, and asked him why he was so angry. His...

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)is possibly the oldest distributed computing project in existence, and has mostly existed on the fringe of the mainstream distributed computing world. Part of this is likely due to the hardcore nerdiness factor of the project. Most people aren't interested in finding huge prime numbers, as potentially useful as they might be. They'd rather fold proteins, search for little green men, or look for spinning neutron stars—all of which have a more tangible appeal than what appears to be numbers for numbers' sake. There are reasons to look for Mersenne primes, though. There are...

I see that there's a move afoot to increase the math and science requirements in our public high schools because jobs today are more high-tech and require more of those skills. So everyone's jumping through hoops, concerned that developing countries are eating our lunch on science and math and saying it's time our kids start cracking the whip. Businesses want high school grads with those skills, and business in Wisconsin usually gets what it wants. So legislators are introducing bills that would require kids to take three years of both science and math courses in order to graduate from high...

Pure Vanity Post: My son is taking Biology and working on a homework assignment. Nowhere in his notes are instructions on how to do this problem, and no examples in the book. It seems like the bulk of the assignment is answering general questions about hypothetical circumstances, not involving mathematical computations. But he showed me this one and he and I are having a bit of an argument about how to solve the mathematical part of the problem. So here's the beginning of the question, that is in question, LOL. "Non-lethal mutation rates are usually very low-let's say 1 in...

16-year-old found new way to solve 19th-century math problem A 16-year-old California boy won a premier high school science competition Monday for his innovative approach to an old math problem that could help in the design of airplane wings. Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, won a $100,000 college scholarship, the top individual prize in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Viscardi said he’s been homeschooled since fifth grade, although he does take math classes at the University of California at San Diego three days a week. His father is a software engineer and his mother,...

This came from a Navy vet buddy who is now a math teacher in England. Subject: Math Matters A recent review of the US math curricula yielded the following summaries. Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but...

Mathematics students have cause to celebrate. A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit. What's more, his simple new framework means calculations can be done without trigonometric tables or calculators, yet often with greater accuracy. Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles. "Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong," says Wildberger, whose book...

Sit and listen to Uncle Dave BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Aug. 22, 1993.) Summer vacation is almost over, so today Uncle Dave has a special back-to-school ''pep talk'' for you young people, starting with these heartfelt words of encouragement: HA HA HA YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNCLE DAVE DOESN'T NEENER NEENER NEENER. Seriously, young people, I have some important back-to-school advice for you, and I can boil it down to four simple words: ``Study Your Mathematics.'' I say this in light of a recent alarming Associated Press story...

Knotted threads carry signs of ancient accountancy.Scientists have picked apart some 500-year-old calculations from the Inca empire. The team deciphered the maths from a series of 'khipus': elaborate structures of coloured, knotted strings. Researchers have long known that the Inca, who lived along the west coast of South America from AD 1400-1532, used such cords to record numbers. But this is the first mathematical relationship found between khipu. And that may help to work out what kind of information they stored. Khipus encode numbers as knots in strings hanging from a cord. The closer a knot is to the cord,...

On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer. "If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?" "This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."...

It is 97 per cent certain that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead - based on sheer logic and mathematics, not faith - according to Oxford professor Richard Swinburne. "New Testament scholars say the only evidence is witnesses in the four gospels. That's only 5 per cent of the evidence," Professor Swinburne, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion, said last night. "We can't judge the question of the resurrection unless we ask first whether there's reason to suppose there is a God, second if we have reason to suppose he would become incarnate and third, if he...

America's elementary school students made solid gains in both reading and mathematics in the first years of this decade, while middle school students made less progress and older teenagers hardly any, according to federal test results released on Thursday. . . . 9-year-old minority students made the most gains. In particular, young black students significantly narrowed the longtime gap between their math and reading scores and those of higher-achieving white students, who also made strong gains. Older minority teenagers, however, scored about as far behind whites as in previous decades, and scores for all groups pointed to a deepening crisis...

My son is taking an algebra course this summer at the Catholic preparatory high school that he is entering as a freshman this year. It's also a political indoctrination course. Neither my son's excellent school nor his excellent math teacher is the source of the indoctrination. The source is the textbook, which is designed to do more than teach algebra. As I will show momentarily, it is also designed to convey politically-correct group-think. Because government schools have a near-monopoly over K-12 education, textbook publishers cater to their largest customer, the government. As a result, Catholic schools and other private schools...

Man breaks 'pi' memory record A Japanese mental health counsellor broke the record for reciting pi from memory in a marathon session from Friday to early yesterday. Haraguchi, 59, recited pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to 83,431 decimal places. Starting at 9am on Friday, Haraguchi, from Chiba, near Tokyo, lost his place around noon. He quickly restarted, completing his feat of recall in the early hours of Saturday. Haraguchi hopes to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, replacing the current record-holder, also Japanese, who recited pi to 42,195 decimal places...

TOKYO - A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday. Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi — a mathematical value that has an infinite number of decimal places — at a public hall in Chiba city, east of Tokyo, on Friday morning and appeared to give up by noon after only reaching 16,000 decimal places, the Tokyo Shimbun said on its Web site. But a determined Haraguchi started anew...

In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions and functions. In the 1998 book, the index listed families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in...

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride the "new, new math"...

It's easy to tell if a given whole number is divisible by 2. Just check whether the last digit is even. There are also simple rules to determine whether a number is divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10. The exception is 7. The known rules for testing for divisibility by 7 are amazingly cumbersome. Here's one such rule. To find out if a number is divisible by 7, double the last digit, then subtract it from the remaining digits of the number. If you get an answer divisible by 7, then the original number is divisible...

By MICHAEL WINERIP Published: May 18, 2005 QUINCY, Mass. This year's math club at Quincy High School in Massachusetts, where Evelyn Ryan, far right, has been the adviser since 1999. Many club members have gone on to attend top-flight United States colleges. While the ethnic mix shifted some, families move here for the same reason my parents did 50 years ago: The housing is affordable, the subway ride to Boston is short, and Quincy public schools still send their top students to the best colleges. Though there has been an influx of Asian immigrants since the 1980's and most of...

The multi-million dollar campaign paid by starving teachers' unions has finally placed our sadly neglected schools at the center of the budget debate. Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Schwarzenegger's scorched earth budget is approved — a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year. That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering. As a public school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather...