Wolfram Blog: Don’t Be Discreet and Learn Discrete Mathematics with Wolfram Language

Wolfram Blog: Don’t Be Discreet and Learn Discrete Mathematics with Wolfram Language. “I am glad to announce the launch of Introduction to Discrete Mathematics, a free interactive course that aims to explore the world of integers and information. This course investigates the mathematical foundations of computation and information theory. It is designed to be compact and efficient, minimizing the number of redundant examples and amount of potentially distracting background material.”

Search Engine Journal: Google Launches New Search Tools To Help With Math & Science

Search Engine Journal: Google Launches New Search Tools To Help With Math & Science. “Google is rolling out new capabilities to Search and Lens that will assist in solving complex math and science problems. These new tools provide step-by-step explanations, solutions, and interactive 3D models to aid visual learning for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.”

ABC News Australia: Retired country maths teacher Robert Martiensen created thousands of artworks in secret

ABC News Australia: Retired country maths teacher Robert Martiensen created thousands of artworks in secret. “It’s the late 1980s and inside a derelict farmhouse on the outskirts of Mount Gambier in South Australia, a reclusive, retired high school maths teacher begins constructing exquisite wooden boxes, each unique, their organic forms determined by the chunk of wood they came from. The artist’s name is Robert Martiensen, though he’s never been to art school. He keeps his life as an artist a secret, avoids cameras and never exhibits or sells his work.”

Marcus on AI: “Math is hard” — if you are an LLM – and why that matters

Marcus on AI: “Math is hard” — if you are an LLM – and why that matters. “Notice anything? It’s not just that the performance on MathGLM steadily declines as the problems gets bigger, with the discrepancy between it and a calculator steadily increasing, it’s that the LLM based system is generalizing by similarity, doing better on cases that are in or near the training set, never, ever getting to a complete, abstract, reliable representation of what multiplication is.”

Education Week: Are Schools Choosing High-Quality Math Curricula? A New Database Offers Clues

Education Week: Are Schools Choosing High-Quality Math Curricula? A New Database Offers Clues . “The Center for Education Market Dynamics, a nonprofit market-intelligence organization, has created a database of math curricula used in 934 districts, representing more than 52 percent of all students in the country. The database demonstrates which publishers hold the most control over the market—but it also tracks the spread of high-quality materials.”

MIT News: A method to interpret AI might not be so interpretable after all

MIT News: A method to interpret AI might not be so interpretable after all. “As autonomous systems and artificial intelligence become increasingly common in daily life, new methods are emerging to help humans check that these systems are behaving as expected. One method, called formal specifications, uses mathematical formulas that can be translated into natural-language expressions. Some researchers claim that this method can be used to spell out decisions an AI will make in a way that is interpretable to humans. MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers wanted to check such claims of interpretability. Their findings point to the opposite: Formal specifications do not seem to be interpretable by humans. “

Northeastern Global News: Do comics help as a STEM learning tool? Northeastern professor’s study aims to answer that question

Northeastern Global News: Do comics help as a STEM learning tool? Northeastern professor’s study aims to answer that question . “The National Science Foundation awarded [Luke] Landherr a grant to examine this in one of the first studies of its kind on whether comics help as a visual learning tool. Landherr will create a series of comics for a core introductory chemical engineering course that will be used at five partner institutions, as well as Northeastern. Landherr will then look at grades as well as concept testing to determine if student understanding and engagement improves when comics are used.”

Dartmouth College: Math Puzzles for the Public

Dartmouth College: Math Puzzles for the Public. “The revised edition of the critically acclaimed 2000 book, Mathematical Puzzles—heralded as ‘the best collection of mind-stretching teasers ever assembled’ by celebrated computer scientist Donald Knuth—is now available free online on the mathematics department’s website. The classic collection, which features puzzles from every continent, is designed for amateur mathematicians of any age, no calculus skills required.”

Study: Revamped calculus course improves learning (Florida International University)

Florida International University: Study: Revamped calculus course improves learning. ” The model, developed at FIU, focuses on mastering different ways of thinking and solving problems – skills that are important beyond the classroom. Rote memorization and large lecture halls have been replaced by active learning classrooms where students work collaboratively to solve problems. The result is greater learning outcomes and an understanding of calculus concepts, as well as better grades than their peers in traditional, lecture-based classes, according to the research.”

New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too

New York Times: A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too. “In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised the target date to 2026.”

Ars Technica: When it comes to advanced math, ChatGPT is no star student

Ars Technica: When it comes to advanced math, ChatGPT is no star student. “An international team of researchers tested what the software could manage by providing the generative AI program with challenging graduate-level mathematics questions. While ChatGPT failed on a significant number of them, its correct answers suggested that it could be useful for math researchers and teachers as a type of specialized search engine.”

Wolfram Blog: Stack the Odds in Your Favor and Master Probability with Wolfram Language

Wolfram Blog: Stack the Odds in Your Favor and Master Probability with Wolfram Language. “I am glad to announce the launch of Introduction to Probability, a free interactive course aiming to help you learn probability intuitively, from simple to advanced concepts. Anyone who wants to learn probability for the first time, needs a refresher or is looking to apply probability professionally will find great value in this course. It will help students understand and use randomness and random variables.”

Wall Street Journal: ChatGPT Needs Some Help With Math Assignments

Wall Street Journal: ChatGPT Needs Some Help With Math Assignments . “If you ask ChatGPT who is taller, Shaquille O’Neal or Yao Ming, the bot accurately says Yao is 7’6” and O’Neal is 7’1” but then concludes that Shaq is taller. The bot miscalculates the square roots of large numbers. Ask it to show its math, and it often produces detailed formulas that look great but contain errors, such as 2 x 300 = 500.”