Math in the Media Archive

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Math in the Media Archive

: Tony Phillips' Take on Math in the Media
A monthly survey of math news; Math Digest
Summaries of media coverage of math; Reviews
Books, plays and films about mathematics

Tony Phillips' Take on Math in the Media
A monthly survey of math news

2012

February: The mathematics of pasta; Correlation from information theory; The hit potential equation; Numerosity in neural networks; Splendeur et misère of mathematicians

January: Pigeon math in the New York Times; Of ants and basketball players; The Khan Academy in the math classroom

2011

December: "How mathematicians rule the markets"; "How to fix Math Education"; Fixing Math Education (cont.); Why Science Majors change their minds, and why not; Monte Carlo methods in mammalian evolution

November: Math in the American Educator; Nobel Prize for Quasicrystals; Archimedes in the New York Times; String theory - the new calculus?; "Biology is too complex to be unified by mathematics"

October: A fax from Archimedes; "Pure mathematics - and that's the problem ..."; Random matrices against HIV

September: Dyscalculia; MoMath in the New York Times; Explosive percolation revisited; Fixing math education

August: "The unplanned impact of mathematics"; Modular DNA computation; Truncated octahedral supramolecular cages; Math and Art in the Hamptons

June-July: Taming Complexity; Capturing Rogue Waves

May: Geomagical squares; Early childhood math in the Times; The "innocent, unconscious" biases that deflect girls from math

April: Multicolor tilings in liquid crystals; How to grow a mind; Number and Language; The sound of π on NPR; John Milnor and the media

March: Enumerative combinatorics in the news; The shape of musical chords

February: Geometric order in Nature's zoo; Cellular automata, literally; Meanwhile, abroad

January: Plimpton 322 in the New York Times; ... and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus; Math and music in three dimensions; WikiLeaks and NP-completeness

2010

December: Math, Models and Mystification; Topology is not enough; Markov models for Bengalese finch songs

November: L'affaire Bogdanov back in Le Monde; Two (equally good) heads better than one; The calm before the tipping point; "Proofiness"

October: Original math on Futurama; The math of consciousness

September: The "rising star hypothesis" tested in math; "Street-fighting Math" on Boing Boing; A theorem in Biochemistry; P and NP, blogs and wiki

August: Lévy flight for fish; Hardy and Ramanujan at Lincoln Center; Electoral math in The New Yorker

June/July: Complexity, diversity and simultaneous diagonalization; "Hands-on and body-in geometry"; Laplacian dynamics on networks; A new use for instantons

May: Simple connectedness in the New York Review of Books; Abstract mathematician = psycho?; E₈, cobalt niobate and the golden mean

April: Electronic topology of annulenes; "The Joy of x"; Issey Miyake meets William Thurston; Fermat's last stand; New math symbols

March: Eulerian circuits in the giant panda genome; The Joint Mathematics Meetings covered in Science; "We don't use algebra"

February: "Alice's adventures in algebra"; The wizard's clock; Packing tetrahedra into a quasicrystal; A weekly math column in The New York Times online

January: Le Monde: So few mathematicians, so much math; Basic instinct: math; Cognitive science applied to teaching math; Back to Antikythera

2009

December: Order from chaos in Monterey Bay; Math Ed in the City Journal; Homomorphic encryption

November: "Israel Gelfand, Math Giant"; Too much math in French schools?; "The Sophisticated Side of Elementary Mathematics"; Martin Gardner celebrated in the New York Times; "Masssively collaborative mathematics"

October: UK apologizes to Alan Turing; Markov chains for the Indus script; Hiding behind Hermite polynomials; Page-ranking the food chain

September: Progress on the Thomson problem; Math: "ubiquitous, supercool, ..."; "The Idolatry of Numbers"; Packing Platonic solids

August: The math of slithering; NYU's Abel Trifecta; Those evil mathematicians, again; Cortical circuits for mental arithmetic

June/July: Math on the Wild Side; "Intimidatingly awesome" knot theory project; Beyond Turing machines

May: Mersenne primes on NPR; "The identification of nontriviality"; Freeman Dyson's magic number; Of math and money

April: Math project wins Intel; Big earmark for mathematical talent detection; "Explosive Percolation"; Mirrors that don't reverse, and others; "The genius who came in from the cold"

March: Bees do it; Congresswoman Waters disses mathematicians; Barry Cipra at the Joint Meetings

February: "Cuddly Topology"; Hiding behind curvature

January: Netflix and the singular value decomposition; "physical reality embodies simple mathematical laws"; Math Ed in the news

2008

December: Random molecular tilings; Roach trigonometry; Math on the Fringe

November: "Samurai mathematician"; The diagonalization of physics; Science goes to MathFest; Math meets the campaign ad on YouTube

October: Solzhenitsyn mathematician; Non-verbal number acuity counts; NIMBioS

September: Antikythera link to Archimedes?; Archimedean approximation to Penrose tiling; "Swinging with math"

August: "Mathematics of the spheres"; E₈ in The New Yorker; Geometry of the mental number line; "Girls = Boys at Math"

June/July: Aztec area algorithms; Polyhedral cages in nerve synapses; Teaching math with concrete examples?

May: Hearing molecular drums; Markov Clusters in the tree of life; The path to algebra: fractions

April: The hole truth?; Midge dynamics in Lake Myvatn; An 80-vertex polytope in Physical Review

March: Professor protagonist; Parallel transport for qubits; Physical Chemistry in 4D; Physical insight into a hard combinatorial problem

February: Numeral cognition and language; "The computational realization of gesture"; The mathematics of choosiness; "A Mathematical Gem"

January: Holographic algorithms; The Gömbök; Math and macromolecular architecture; "Everything in our world is purely mathematical - including you"

2007

December: cosmic geometries; Euclid in China, in 1607; First encounters in strange places; Math for the birds, or maybe not
November: How complex is mathematics?; Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language; Nash equilibria for bacteria
October: Hardy and Ramanujan - the play; Hardy and Ramanujan - the novel; Math: Gift from God or Work of Man?; Women, Girls and Math - on NPR
September: OMG! Math is cool!; Electrical geometry: the Elephant-nose fish; Origami pinecones; The Myth. The Math. The Sex.
August: "A Twist on the Möbius Band"; Geometry and the Imagination; Homer Simpson: "Mmm....p"
June/July: Too good at math?; Mathematical patterns in songs; Curvature and the growth of cells
May 2007: Computing with locomotives; Mathematical tools needed; Misaligned math tests
April 2007: E8 in the New York Times; E8 in the media; Intel silver and bronze for math projects; Cooking Gaussian curvature; "Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime"
March 2007: Fibonacci music; Medieval Islamic quasi-periodic tilings
February 2007: Ricci flow on Science cover; x e-x in a tropical rainforest.; Sculptor and mathematician; "Proof at a roll of the dice."
January 2007: Nine lawyers and a mathematician; The math of swarms; Math propaganda on Bay Area TV; "I was a teenage angle trisector."; Mathematician becomes "Genome Sleuth"

2006

December 2006: Rebellion at Topology; Spidrons; "As Math Scores Lag ..."; Math, Podcast from the Ozarks
November 2006: The Emperor of Math; "Numbers are Male, said Pythagoras ..."; Next year in Marienbad: chaos; "Less happy + less confidence = good math student"
October 2006: The Geometry of Musical Chords; Epithelial topology; Mathematical error control
September 2006: Math: Whale Songs --> Kaleidoscopic Images; The Poincaré Conjecture on National Public Radio; ... and in the New York Times; More math on NPR: encryption; soccer-ball design
August 2006: Summertime, when math losses come easy; Math at the World Cup; Gravitational waves in the news; Nanoscale Minimal Surface?
June/July 2006: "The N.S.A's Math Problem"; Void in a golden cage; Now Math Diplomacy - I; Now Math Diplomacy - II
May 2006: 1+ 1 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 8 = a poem; "A Helix with a Handle"; Dynamics of Roach Congregation
April 2006: Counting Ben Franklin's magic squares; Chaos in the deep; The differential geometry of quantum computation
March 2006: Fractals finger suspect Pollocks; Plant growth and the Golden Ratio, re-evaluated; Mathematical Incompleteness in the Scientific American
February 2006: "The Geometry of the Jungle"; Deal or No Deal?; Cuboctahedral vesicles in eukaryotic cells
January 2006: The Euclidean metric and jail time; Mathematical patterns in asthma attacks; Atiyah pulls the strings

2005

December 2005: Penfield NY, a front in "the nationwide math wars"; Glacial climate cycles and the least common multiple; Math on the Millennium Bridge
November 2005: The math of meniscus mountaineering; Hermann Weyl, remembered in Nature; A new topology for the internet
October 2005: Math and the art of mattress flipping; Virus geometry; Dirac: algebraist or geometer?
September 2005: Math and narrative on Mykonos; World's largest nano-deltahedron; Fibonacci numbers on microstructures?
August 2005: Penrose tiling Down Under; Math and the Unicorn Tapestries
June/July 2005: Plaster math models as art; The math behind "Intelligent Design"; Archimedes palimpsest update
May 2005: The math beneath the Interplanetary Superhighway; Peter Lax in the New York Times; The math of craquelure; Proof checking by computer assistants
April 2005: Differential geometry and the Venus Flytrap; Wrong, Wrong and Wrong; Amateur math in ancient Japan
March 2005: More Origami Mathematics; Algorithmic complexity in evolution; Relativity. Incompleteness. Uncertainty.; Six degrees of self-similarity
February 2005: Crocheted Manifold; "Blood, math and gore."; More about "Numb3rs"; Terror Network Theory
January 2005: Ant Geometry; The Magic of Math, in Queens; Father of fractals

2004

December 2004: IT and the Riemann Hypothesis; Gödel's Theorem on ABC News; Making wavelets in the art world
November 2004: Math in a fly's eye; Tradition vs. Modernity; Topology and the Aharonov-Bohm effect; Solve the equation, get the job
October 2004: Mandelbrot and the Market; Math and the Gypsy Moth; Musings on the Math Olympiad; More on the 5th posulate
September 2004: The Math of Medical Marriages; Bird Logic; Calculus, the play
July/August 2004: Mathematical Origami; Local Boy Makes Good?; Mind, Music and Math
June 2004: The Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball; DNA does the twist; Understanding the ununderstandable
May 2004: More about Kepler's Problem; Math is hard!; Recent math history in the Chronicle; Inside gifted brains; The Bayesian revolution; Chaos in Nature
April 2004: Atiyah, Singer in The Boston Globe; Math Ed in Britain; Statistical Topology of Networks
March 2004: Google salutes Julia; Perelman in Nature; Groupoids and the leech heart; Love Model Equations
February 2004: Aromatic Möbius strip; Perelman in the Baltimore Sun; "Malignant Maths"; Bayesian athletics; Bayesian filters for spam
January 2004: Archimedes Combinatorist; Michael in India; Calculators vs. math skills; Largest prime yet; Mathe-musical instrument

2003

December 2003: Everything and More; The Most Important Problem; Who invented the electronic digital computer?; Far East Math Flap; Hilbert Hotel Onstage; Auxin and the Fibonacci Numbers
November 2003: Why math books are hot; At home in dodecahedral space; Math on the golf course
October 2003: Infinite Wisdom; Wolfram in Washington; African Institute; Paul Wolfowitz, "former mathematician"
September 2003: 15 milliseconds of fame; Women at the EDGE; Death and the heptagon; A heap of trouble; "Please Pile on the Problems? This Has to Be Math Camp"
July/August 2003: New York State Regents Math Flap; "Pure Math - Pure Joy"; Gravitational caustics; Where do we do math?; Beyond Buckyballs
June 2003: Math in Nature; Imaginary numbers in The Observer; The Golden Mean in The New York Times; The Poincaré Conjecture (cont.); Dog bites math
May 2003: The Poincaré Conjecture; Coot Math; Wolfram at the Cooper-Hewitt; "The Superformula"
April 2003: This doughnut universe; Knots in the Washington Post; Anthrax: the math
March 2003: 4 log 3 - a new cosmic constant?; Ethnomath in the Times Magazine; Math reform in Russia; Quantum computing in The Economist
February 2003: Splits at Clay; Gödel in Science; "Math's Wild and Crazy Guy"; Figure Skating; Mathematical oncology; Democracy and despotism
January 2003: The Putnam in Time; Too much pi?; The best ways to lace; Freak waves

2002

December 2002: Locust neuron math; The topology of NOT; Elevens and nines on NPR; Computational Biology in Nature
November 2002: Football math; A mathematical phase transition; Ig Noble math; The next big thing; Bust to boom at Rochester
October 2002: Perfect Graphs; Algorithmic Architecture; Home on the Fractal Range; Ants vote for Wolfram; Neurons do Math; More primes in the Times
September 2002: The fifty-micron Möbius strip; Baby Math on NPR; Solving an Escher Puzzle; Primes in the Times; Post-mortem on the Geometry Center; 143-Year-Old Problem
July/August 2002: The number line is real; Stephen Wolfram and the New York Times; Math in the USSR; A tough math problem in internet routing
June 2002: Moving with VIGRE; A new kind of science?; Math teachers with no math; New / old math probes the big bang; A differential equation for organism growth; Trig tables in verse
May 2002: "Computers, Paradoxes and the Foundations of Mathematics"; Flies, weeds and statistical mechanics; The Erdös Prizes; Nash sightings; DNA Computer solves a hard problem; Poincaré conjecture on NPR, and in the Times; Sidewalk math on NPR
April 2002: "Hi-IQ Math Hunks heat up films, plays"; Spinning eggs; Cellular automata at the seashore; Math plagiarism; More about Nash
March 2002: More backstage math; "Highly enjoyable and interesting people"; Math on 42nd street; Fourier transform of the fossil record; Large-scale sign error; "The Shape of the Universe: Ten Possibilities"
February 2002: Polyhedron Man; The Differential Equations of Pathogen Virulence; More about John Nash; Dynamic Catastrophe Theory
January 2002: A beautiful movie; Tiny computer factors 15; "Knot Possible"; A mathematician backstage; Waves of measles

2001

December 2001: Living and breathing fractals; More about hats; Biomolecular finite-state automata; A new Proof; Mathematica - the show
November 2001: Chinese characters; Evolution's mathematical rhythm; Haven't we had this conversation before?; Multiplication in the brain; Catastrophes in Nature; Drunk on fractals
October 2001: The Gordian unknot; Answering an Age-Old Cry: When Will I Use This Math?; The Abel prize; Photo Solitons
September 2001: Math Anxiety and Math Competence; What is Math about?; Tying and untying molecular knots; Wiles at the Olympiad; Is pi normal?
July/August 2001: Poor Richard's Magic Squares; Two Tony's for Proof; "I prove a theorem and the house expands ..."; e^x on the Op-Ed page; Geometric Quantum Computation; "Surprisingly Square"; John Nash, and the movie
June 2001: Computing an Organism; Proof on NPR; Flat and Flatter; Why don't we have six limbs?; Complexity too simple?; Newton vs. Leibniz on the air; Physiological rhythms; Beyond the spherical cow
May 2001: What color is my hat?; Schools' "New Math" = Trouble for City Kids; Fun with Fermat; Alan Alda, math wannabe; Pulitzer for Proof; Benjamin Peirce in The New Yorker; "A Beautiful Mind" - the movie
April 2001: Math in The Lancet; Solitons in matter; Teenager finds new triangle theorem; God, Stephen Wolfram, etc.; Calculus with Mother Hen
March 2001: Unknotting the unknot; Knots on the air; Iannis Xenakis; Jock Math I; Jock Math II; Chaos? Complexity?
February 2001: Rereading Plimpton 322; "Loving Math Infinitely"; How do fish swim?; Digital Archimedes; Math teachers are nerds ... not; Math and Fiction. Incompatible careers?
January 2001: Race to settle Catalan conjecture; Prez mentions math; "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama"; "Beautiful Minds"; Method and madness

2000

December 2000: That was the election that was; Fermat's Last Tango; Recognition for mathematics; The butterfly effect?; Math history on the web; 31 Prime, 35 Past Prime?; The exhibit Art and Mathematics 2000
November 2000: The tiniest dodecahedron; Strange attractors onstage; Incompressible is incomprehensible; A new Federal encryption algorithm; The geometry of a fender-bender
October 2000: Online Math Quiz October 17; Computation with 2-dimensional DNA; More math into biology!; Math genes?; Slime-mould topology; Retinal Calculus
September 2000: Updating Ramanujan; Making RNA think; 5 + 2 = yellow; Contentious disciples; A Figure-8 knot in a protein; Math in Los Angeles
July/August 2000: Roach Applied Math; Pinning down the Butterfly; The Joy of Sharing
June 2000: Math on Broadway; Honeybee Calculus and Analytic Geometry; Euler's Spinning Penny
May 2000: $1,000,000 revisited; Heinous math?; "The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem"; "Flexible Math Meets a Parental Rebellion"
April 2000: Double Bubbles; More Monkey Math; Squeeze in a few more?; How to win $1,000,000
March 2000: Pebbles to Microchips; Beyond Quadratic Reciprocity; Theory of Liquid Spikes
February 2000: Math Snow Sculpture Wins Prize at Breckenridge; Bubbles can sink in stout; More on Parrando's Paradox; "DNA Computer is created and does Complex Calculations"; More Chimp Math?; "The Curl of Agnesi"
January 2000: Microscopic predators and prey; Heads you lose, tails you lose; Math + Art = Dada; Bees know best

1999

December 1999: The most influential lecture ever given in mathematics?; Why does a negative times a negative equal a positive?; Things that go bump
November 1999: The crumpling catastrophe; How to slice a tort?; Beautiful dynamics
October 1999: "Systematic enumeration of crystalline networks"; Unexpected behavior from fractal drums; Fermat's Last Theorem; No room on the family tree; "Randomness Everywhere"
July/August 1999: Jackson Pollock's drip paintings; Fractals in the family room; Your cell phone may soon have a fractal antenna; Randomly ravenous rabbits?; "Connections between music and science are subtle and uncertain"; "Multifractality in human heartbeat dynamics"
June 1999: Written in stone; "Mathematical genius Kurt Gödel"; Unreadable but irresistible; "For math whizzes, victory equals respect"; "Brain's Math Machine Traced to 2 Circuits"; Math on the Web in MathML soon?
May 1999: The music of the spheres; Learn inference and logical rigor from a computer game?; Ada and the Bernoulli Numbers; Plot of Internet traffic against time gives a curve with the self-similarity of a fractal!
April 1999: Space could be finite; "Playful thinking can often lead to serious mathematics"; "Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science"; "Why does the telephone cord always get twisted?"; A Knotty Mathematical Problem?; "Math Emerges Blinking Into the Glare of Popular Culture"; The Lagrangian Codes; The math of slime molds and ant bridges
March 1999: Snow Sculpting with Mathematics; A faster Web from group theory?; Real-world applications; Unknots that can't be untied; Symmetric singular sextic surface

1998

1998: "Mathematics is ... the fuel that NASA increasingly uses..."; "The Penultimate Conjecture," by Leonard Michaels; "A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street"; "Once upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories"; "Mathematical Recreations" of Ian Stewart; André Weil; "The Geometry of the Universe"; Peter Griffin, author of "The Theory of Blackjack"; Japanese Temple Geometry

1997

1997: Interview with Ennio DeGiorgi; The Proof program on Fermat's Last Theorem on PBS; The Bible Code; Mathematics and the "Science Wars"; AMS adopts stand on new immigration law; Beyond Numbers, a travelling museum exhibition about mathematics; Dr. Neal Lane, Director of the National Science Foundation; Breaking the Code to air on PBS; Paul Erdős dies at 83

Math Digest
*Summaries of media coverage of math*
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Reviews
*Books, plays, movies and television shows*
The Reviews page lists and links to reviews of books, plays, movies and television shows that are related to mathematics (but are not aimed solely at the professional mathematician). The Reviews page is updated monthly.