Lifeboat Foundation

This is a story about math educator Mark Saul, and his Math on The Border program for migrant children. Mark and his team are trying to work with these children, and to encourage them. Mark is not only one of the best math educators in the world, he is also an amazing human being.

Having an opportunity to use one’s brain is a basic human need, says Saul. Back at the Templeton Foundation, he studied under-exploited human capital and the boundless human potential. Despite their difficult past and uncertain future, migrant children are eager to build their math skills. Resourceful and resilient in the face of failure, they reshuffle the pieces and try again. They work in groups and make new friends along the way. Many of them are highly gifted – Saul can attest to that. It doesn’t take him long to see what these children, abandoned by life, are capable of with just a little encouragement. And he can tell from the looks on their faces how delighted they are at having their abilities recognized and valued.

Continue reading “How A Leading Educator For Gifted Students Discovers Untapped Potential Of Migrant Children Through Math” »

An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together.

It’s a sad day. The observatory has not only been used to observe radio wave signals in deep space. It’s also become an iconic landmark over the decades after being featured in countless films and TV shows including the 1995 James Bond blockbuster “GoldenEye.”

The observatory has also made significant contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), spotting mysterious radio signals emanating from distant corners of the universe.

“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but safety of people is our number one priority,” Sean Jones, the assistant director for the mathematical and physical sciences directorate at NSF, told reporters today over a conference call, as quoted by The Verge.

Calculations show how theoretical ‘axionic strings’ could create odd behavior if produced in exotic materials in the lab.

A hypothetical particle that could solve one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology just got a little less mysterious. A RIKEN physicist and two colleagues have revealed the mathematical underpinnings that could explain how so-called axions might generate string-like entities that create a strange voltage in lab materials.

Axions were first proposed in the 1970s by physicists studying the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes how some elementary particles are held together within the atomic nucleus. The trouble was that this theory predicted some bizarre properties for known particles that are not observed. To fix this, physicists posited a new particle—later dubbed the axion, after a brand of laundry detergent, because it helped clean up a mess in the theory.

Continue reading “Dark Matter Candidate Could Generate String-Like Entities in Exotic Materials” »

Extreme quantum states.

A new mathematical framework helps physicists define the degree of quantumness of a system.

AI designed to be aware of it’s own competence.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Jiangying Zhou, DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office, USA.

Continue reading “Expect the Unexpected: Frontiers of Mathematics, Computation, Systems and Design” »

Sophomore math major Xzavier Herbert was never much into science fiction or the space program, but his skills in pure mathematics seem to keep drawing him into NASA’s orbit.

With an interest in representation theory, Herbert spent the summer virtually at NASA, studying connections between classical information theory and quantum information theory, each of which corresponds to a different set of laws: classical physics and quantum mechanics.

“What I’m doing involves how representation theory allows us to draw a direct analog from classical information theory to quantum information theory,” Herbert says. “It turns out that there is a mathematical way of justifying how these are related.”

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO Bioquark interviews Dr. Michelle Francl the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry, at Bryn Mawr College, and an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory.

Ira Pastor comments:

Continue reading “Tripping Over the Mysteries of the Universe: Molecules, Particles and People” »

In a story of lost and stolen books and scrupulous detective work across continents, a Caltech historian and his former student have unearthed previously uncounted copies of Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking science book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known more colloquially as the Principia. The new census more than doubles the number of known copies of the famous first edition, published in 1687. The last census of this kind, published in 1953, had identified 187 copies, while the new Caltech survey finds 386 copies. Up to 200 additional copies, according to the study authors, likely still exist undocumented in public and private collections.

“We felt like Sherlock Holmes,” says Mordechai (Moti) Feingold, the Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of the History of Science and the Humanities at Caltech, who explains that he and his former student, Andrej Svorenčík (MS ‘08) of the University of Mannheim in Germany, spent more than a decade tracing copies of the book around the world. Feingold and Svorenčík are co-authors of a paper about the survey published in the journal Annals of Science.

Moreover, by analyzing ownership marks and notes scribbled in the margins of some of the books, in addition to related letters and other documents, the researchers found evidence that the Principia, once thought to be reserved for only a select group of expert mathematicians, was more widely read and comprehended than previously thought.