Making decisions in the face of a natural disaster like the one that recently struck Haiti is not always easy. A team of mathematicians from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) has developed a computer system that could clarify the best strategies to adopt after an earthquake, flood or tsunami.
Mathematics is based on highly abstract principles and rules about how to structure, process, and evaluate numerical information. By teaching rhesus monkeys to order groups of points according to their size on a screen, neurobiologists Sylvia Bongard and Andreas Nieder of the University of Tubingen in Germany have found that these animals can quickly master the concept of "greater than" quantities. and "less than", obtaining 90% correct answers.
A team of scientists from the University of Girona and the Max Plank Institute in Germany has found that some mathematical algorithms for artificial vision allow a computer to be programmed to "understand" a painting and identify the artistic style to which it belongs. However, machines are still a long way from interpreting art like people.
Do the following test. Ask a friend to make a list of ten words or numbers. Read it once. Then try to remember the items and say them out loud. Most people repeat a maximum of seven items.
An international team of scientists has solved an ancient mathematical problem with billions of solutions. The milestone has been possible thanks to a technique to multiply numbers so long that if we wrote the digits they would occupy twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
Biologists from the Universities of Chicago and Michigan have modified the algorithms used by Google to rank pages (PageRank) and have applied them to find out which species are key to the survival of different ecosystems.
In Europe they are developing control systems that will allow autonomous vehicles, without a steering wheel or driver, to communicate and cooperate with each other, avoiding traffic congestion and collisions in the cities of the future.
We interview this Catalan professor of mathematics, who is convinced that we can laugh with Archimedes, be ecstatic at the hidden beauty of square roots or use statistics to improve sexuality.
Danni Büchner is invited to Sam Dylan's Halloween party. But the "Goodbye Germany" emigrant has no desire for many other party guests. And find clear words.
