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At least 2,500 ninth-graders in Prince George's County will abruptly move this week from a standard one-year algebra course into a two-year program, shielding the struggling students from a state graduation test this spring that officials said they were likely to fail. The highly unusual shift comes midway through the school year in one of Washington's largest suburban school systems and in some respects runs counter to a regional trend of pushing students to take higher-level mathematics as early as possible. ....Starting Tuesday, those students will move into a retooled class called Algebraic Concepts. That will give them a one-year...

The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. This has happened before. In past decades, the marriage of higher math and computer modeling transformed science and engineering. Quants turned finance upside down a generation ago. And data miners plucked useful nuggets from vast consumer and business databases. But just look at where the mathematicians are now. They're helping to map out advertising campaigns, they're changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they're enabling...

CELESTIAL AND MATHEMATICAL PRECISION IN ANCIENT ARCHITECTUREAnd we think we’re advanced MELISSA HIEBERT STAFF Many ancient ruins demonstrate that the people who constructed them had not only a special regard for celestial bodies and mathematics, but also a spot-on accuracy. From Egypt to Mexico, there is no doubt that past civilizations were involved in incredibly complex space calculations, mathematics and architectural endeavours. Although many historians and archaeologists debate exactly what these civilizations did intentionally and what they did by mere chance, here are a few examples of how ancient architecture was created with mathematics and the cosmos in mind. iza...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday. The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago. A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 — 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 — that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1. Mersenne primes are a...

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...