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Math DigestSummaries of Media Coverage of Math
Edited by Mike Breen and Annette Emerson, AMS Public Awareness Officers  An article about a proof of a conjecture concerning Sudoku puzzles
This Month's Math Digest Summaries Posted here February 2012: New Oscar math, Better image processing, and the 2012 national Who Wants to Be a Mathematician ...
Brie Finegold summarizes blogs about the Elsevier boycott.
"Elsevier--my part in its downfall," Timothy Gower. Gower's Weblog, 21 January, 2012; On the heels of SOPA, PIPA, and the lesser known Research Works Act, many high-profile blogging mathematicians including Tim Gowers, Terence Tao, and John Baez have decided to protest the publishing practices of Elsevier. During the course of just a few weeks, about 2500 scientists and mathematicians have signed a petition at the website thecostofknowledge.com/ declaring their unwillingness to publish, referee, or do editorial work for the publisher. In 2006, the editorial board of Topology quit because of their disapproval of Elsevier's high prices and practice of bundling subscriptions to their journals. Elsevier recently supported the Research Works Act, which prohibits open-access mandates from being applied to scientific research that was conducted using federal funding. While the print media does not yet seem to be taking much notice, a recent article in Forbes references Gower's blog and comments that the protest is likely to spread beyond mathematics and the hard sciences. Another article in The Chronicle of Higher Education also references Gowers and discusses Elsevier's response to the allegations from concerned researchers. Discussion has already begun on the Secret Blogging Seminar and other blogs about replacements and alternatives to Elsevier's journals. --- Brie Finegold
"A Math Study Provides Hints About the Game’s Gender Gap," by Dylan Loeb McClain. The New York Times, 21 January 2012; These three articles were inspired by a study that appeared in the January 2012 issue of the AMS Notices. The study, "Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance", by Jonathan Kane and Janet Mertz, examined data from 86 countries and found evidence that social factors, rather than biological ones, account for difference in boys' and girls' performance in mathematics. In particular, they found that in countries with a high level of gender equity, both boys and girls do well in mathematics. The above-cited New York Times article appeared in the chess column. After a brief description of the Notices article, McClain notes: "There are many similarities between chess and mathematics as disciplines, so the findings shed light on why women chess players are not as successful as men.'' He then segues into a discussion of a chess game in a recent tournament in which a woman chess competitor displayed a particularly aggressive and incisive style. The Los Angeles Times article is an opinion column written by two academics: Barnett is a senior scientist at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, and Rivers is a Boston University journalism professor. The pair wrote the book The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children. "[I]t's time to call a halt to the endless search for a male math gene, to the cry for more and more studies because someday we're going to find proof of men's innate superiority, and to the ongoing spate of articles saying that we really know that nature makes boys better," Barnett and Rivers write. "It's time to move from bickering over data to building new evidence-based public policies that will empower all of our children---and, in turn, society." A previous Math Digest item reported on the worldwide media coverage that ensued shortly after the publication of the Kane-Mertz article. --- Allyn Jackson "Better mathematics boosts image-processing algorithm," by Jacob Aron. New Scientist, 20 January 2012. Much of modern technology depends on efficient transmission, reception, and storage of signals; an example is the way a smart phone efficiently compresses and stores audio and video files. Signal processing is an area of research that draws on tools from engineering and mathematics to create algorithms for the efficient handling of all kinds of signals: sounds, images, sensor data, experimental observations, etc. This brief article discusses an advance in which the combination of two different signal processing algorithms resulted in a new technique that can process certain signals 10,000 times faster than other methods. --- Allyn Jackson "Plot Thickens on Oscar Ballot," by Carl Bialik. The Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2012. The math formula used to select Oscar finalists is getting a makeover for the first time since 1936. The new formula which gives greater weight to the top vote on every ballot has Oscar enthusiasts scrambling to figure out how the change will affect which stars get invited to walk the red carpet. Many find the new system perplexing. Steven Brams, a political scientist at New York University, calls it "totally ad hoc," and adds, "If they want to engage in trial by error every year, I cannot stop them." However there are academics that defend the new. "While the system could be better, it does a moderately good job of being fair and selecting good films," says Nicolaus Tideman, an economist at Virginia Tech. Donald G. Saari, a mathematician at the University of California, Irvine, sees difficulties likely to arise. "Can the Academy find ways to get around these difficulties?" says Prof. Saari. "Of course. Many such methods exist." One thing both award analysts and mathematicians agree on is that movies with passionate support from a relatively small group of people will benefit from the change, while pictures appealing to a wider audience are set to lose out. --- Baldur Hedinsson "Spot check." The Economist, 14 January 2012. A math formula can apply to large things and small. The Economist reports on how a single formula can explain the pattern of tree patches in arid climates and at the same time the arrangement of stripes and spots on feline coats. Mathematician Bonni Kealy of Washington State University gave a talk on the discovery at the January meeting of the AMS and MAA in Boston. For those curious about how non-linear partial differential equations can produce such universal patterns, the research paper "A Nonlinear Stability Analysis of Vegetative Turing Pattern Formation for an Interaction–Diffusion Plant-Surface Water Model System in an Arid Flat Environment' is available online. --- Baldur Hedinsson "Pasta Graduates from Alphabet Soup to Advanced Geometry," by Kenneth Chang. The New York Times, 9 January 2012.
--- Ben Polletta "Blue Valley West freshman wins $10k in math contest," by Joe Robertson. The Kansas City Star, 10 January 2012.
Nine other students competed in the contest and about half were covered by their local media:
Read and hear more about all 10 contestants in the 2012 national Who Wants to Be a Mathematician (Photo by E. David Luria). --- Mike Breen "A Unique Expression Of Love For Math," by Ari Daniel Shapiro. NPR's All Things Considered, 10 January 2012.
--- Lisa DeKeukelaere "Mathematician claims breakthrough in Sudoku puzzle," by Eugenie Samuel Reich. Nature, 6 January 2012.
--- Lisa DeKeukelaere "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake," by Philip Ball. Nature, 22/29 December 2011, page 455.
(Image: "Snowflake Model 2," by David Griffeath, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Janko Gravner, University of California, Davis. See more of their work on the Mathematical Imagery page.) --- Ben Polletta
Math on New Scientist TV. Various dates. New Scientist TV combines short articles with short videos to produce vivid illustrations of intriguing math and physics topics. Postings in December 2011 and January 2012 featured dramatic and instructive mathematical videos of Jos Leys, a Belgian video artist with a strong mathematical bent. (Aficionados of the AMS Feature Column will recall the November 2006 column by Leys and mathematician Étienne Ghys, "Lorenz and Modular Flows: A Visual Introduction", which uses Leys's sensational graphics to explain some quite deep mathematics.) --- Allyn Jackson
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Thirteen-year-old Shyam Narayanan (at left, holding the check) was the big winner in the 
