Showing all posts about mathematics
The birthday effect: you are somewhat likely to die on your birthday
12 May 2025
The birthday effect is a thing it seems. Russell Samora, writing for The Pudding crunches the numbers. It looks like quite a few people expire on their “special day”.
Why is there a birthday effect at all? One popular idea centers on the psychological impact of death postponement versus anniversary reaction: Does the looming birthday cause people to postpone death until after they’ve celebrated their special day, or does the birthday itself somehow trigger mortality?
I’ve never liked birthdays, and now I know why…
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The 2022 Fields Medals for excellence in mathematics
6 July 2022
And now for something a little different… Maryna Viazovska, James Maynard, June Huh, and Hugo Duminil-Copin, have been named recipients of the 2022 Fields Medals, which recognise outstanding mathematical achievement. The Fields Medals are only awarded every four years, to mathematicians under the age of forty, by the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union.
I suck at maths, I truly do. I need a spreadsheet to reconcile my budget to buy cups of coffee. But I was impressed by the work undertaken by the 2022 recipients. Hugo Duminil-Copin was commended for “solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, especially in dimensions three and four.”
That made some sense, up until the word phase.
Maryna Viazovska’s work also sounds outstanding: “for the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.”
No, sorry, I didn’t get a single word of that. Thankfully though there are people in the world who understand these sorts of things.
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An equation that goes looking for love in all the optimal places
6 October 2011
We know money can’t buy love, but can an equation help you find it… or are some things best left to chance? Whatever, Michael Trick has devised a formula:
Despite these handicaps, if you know how many candidates there are, there is a simple rule to maximize the chance of finding the best mate: sample the first K candidates without selecting any of them, and then take the first subsequent candidate who is the best of all you have seen. K depends on N, the total number of candidates you will see. As N gets big, K moves toward 1/e times N, where e is 2.71… So sample 36.9% of the candidates, then take the first candidate who is the best you have seen. This gives a 36.9% chance of ending up with Ms (in my case) Right.
Originally published Thursday 6 October 2011, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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