SciTechDaily: Carnegie Mellon Tool Automatically Turns Math Into Beautiful and Instructive Illustrations. “The tool enables users to create diagrams simply by typing an ordinary mathematical expression and letting the software do the drawing. Unlike a graphing calculator, these expressions aren’t limited to basic functions, but can be complex relationships from any area of mathematics. The researchers named it Penrose after the noted mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who is famous for using diagrams and other drawings to communicate complicated mathematical and scientific ideas.”
mathematics
Rochester Institute of Technology: RIT researchers create easy-to-use math-aware search interface
Rochester Institute of Technology: RIT researchers create easy-to-use math-aware search interface. “Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have developed MathDeck, an online search interface that allows anyone to easily create, edit and lookup sophisticated math formulas on the computer. Created by an interdisciplinary team of more than a dozen faculty and students, MathDeck aims to make math notation interactive and easily shareable, rather than an obstacle to mathematical study and exploration.”
Disease modeling: How Math Can Help In A Pandemic (GAO WatchBlog)
GAO WatchBlog: Disease modeling: How Math Can Help In A Pandemic. “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new attention to models of infectious disease. These models are critical tools that scientists—including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—use to anticipate health care needs and explore options for responding to an outbreak. Today’s WatchBlog looks at the basics of infectious disease modeling, which we reviewed in a recent 2-page Spotlight. It also looks at our recent report on how federal agencies like the CDC use modeling, and how they might improve their use.”
EurekAlert: Carnegie Mellon tool automatically turns math into pictures
EurekAlert: Carnegie Mellon tool automatically turns math into pictures. “Some people look at an equation and see a bunch of numbers and symbols; others see beauty. Thanks to a new tool created at Carnegie Mellon University, anyone can now translate the abstractions of mathematics into beautiful and instructive illustrations. The tool enables users to create diagrams simply by typing an ordinary mathematical expression and letting the software do the drawing. Unlike a graphing calculator, these expressions aren’t limited to basic functions, but can be complex relationships from any area of mathematics.”
Phys .org: Mathematical curves predict evolution in COVID-19 spread
Phys .org: Mathematical curves predict evolution in COVID-19 spread. “Efforts to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic are now the top priority of governments across the globe. As they make these life-saving decisions, it is particularly crucial for policymakers to accurately predict how the spread of the virus will change over time. Through research published in EPJ Plus, Ignazio Ciufolini at the University of Salento, and Antonio Paolozzi at Sapienza University of Rome, identify a clear mathematical trend in the evolution of daily new cases and death numbers in China, and use the same curve to predict how a similar slowdown will unfold in Italy.”
North Carolina State University: Free Math Mapper Tool Helps Parents, Teachers Advance Mathematical Learning for Middle Grades Students at Home During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic
North Carolina State University: Free Math Mapper Tool Helps Parents, Teachers Advance Mathematical Learning for Middle Grades Students at Home During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic . “As schools in North Carolina have moved toward remote learning to slow the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), Jere Confrey, Ph.D., Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of mathematics education at the NC State College of Education, and the Scaling Up Digital Design Studies (SUDDS) team are offering an online mathematics diagnostic tool for free to the public. The Math Mapper tool offers free diagnostic practice problems and assessments designed to evaluate middle school students’ mathematical progress on learning trajectories to determine what students know and what they still need to learn.”
CU Boulder Today: Mathematician using Facebook data in the fight against COVID-19
CU Boulder Today: Mathematician using Facebook data in the fight against COVID-19. “CU Boulder researcher Daniel Larremore has never held a nasal swab and doesn’t wear scrubs. Instead, he relies on math to track the spread of human diseases. This week, Larremore and several colleagues from Colorado joined a nationwide study that seeks to use social media data to better understand how coronavirus cases might grow and travel in the coming weeks. The COVID-19 Mobility Data Network will draw on huge volumes of anonymized location information supplied by Facebook to follow how groups of people move from spot to spot over time. That will allow researchers like Larremore, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the BioFrontiers Institute, to build maps that show where people are still traveling in the age of social distancing.”
Extremely cool teacher runs math lesson from home within ‘Half Life: Alyx’ (Mashable)
Mashable: Extremely cool teacher runs math lesson from home within ‘Half Life: Alyx’. “Extremely cool teacher Charles Coomber —who works for California’s Springs Charter schools, at the Otay Ranch Academy for the Arts — taught a lesson in angle vocabulary from his apartment set within the long-awaited new virtual reality first-person shooter from developer Valve. Half Life: Alyx dropped on Monday, years after the iconic original game was released in 1998, and its sequel in 2006.”
The Conversation: How to flatten the curve of coronavirus, a mathematician explains
The Conversation: How to flatten the curve of coronavirus, a mathematician explains. “This general concept of slowing the virus’s spread has been termed “flattening the curve” by epidemiologists – experts who study how often diseases occur in different populations, and why. The term has become widespread on social media as the public is encouraged to practise ‘social distancing’. But how does social distancing help to flatten the curve? We can explain by referring to what mathematicians call ‘exponential growth’.
Wolfram Blog: 15 Ways Wolfram|Alpha Can Help with Your Classes
Wolfram Blog: 15 Ways Wolfram|Alpha Can Help with Your Classes. “Thinking back on those late-night study sessions, I would have saved a lot of time if I had properly used Wolfram|Alpha as a study tool. Because I was a biology major, many of the areas in which I most frequently sought information were related to scientific fields such as chemistry, but Wolfram|Alpha can be a valuable resource in so many more areas. Here are 15 applications of Wolfram|Alpha in topics beyond mathematics. I hope you will find these to be useful both inside and outside the classroom!”
University of Sydney: How a first edition of Principia with Isaac Newton’s notes got to Sydney
New-to-me, from the University of Sydney: How a first edition of Principia with Isaac Newton’s notes got to Sydney. “While the original print run is estimated at between 250 and 400 copies, there are only 189 surviving first editions in the world and only four with annotations by the English mathematician himself. Of these four copies, the Sydney copy of Principia is the only one in the Southern Hemisphere and is held in the Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of Sydney library…. The University of Sydney copy of Principia has been digitised and is available online alongside other digital resources via the University’s digital collection.”
Lifehacker: How to Unlock Microsoft’s Free Graphing Calculator in Windows 10
Lifehacker: How to Unlock Microsoft’s Free Graphing Calculator in Windows 10. “While your math teacher (or your kid’s math teacher) might not let them lug a laptop into their calculus class, I still think it’s awesome that Microsoft is finally giving the good ol’ Windows Calculator a boost of geekiness. If you thought ‘Scientific’ mode was fun, you haven’t seen anything yet—coming soon, to Windows 10, is a full-fledged graphing calculator.”
EurekAlert: Math that feels good
EurekAlert: Math that feels good. “Mathematics and science Braille textbooks are expensive and require an enormous effort to produce — until now. A team of researchers has developed a method for easily creating textbooks in Braille, with an initial focus on math textbooks.”
Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Helping to Make Math “Graspable,” WPI Researchers Guide Design of Algebra Tool for Students and Teachers
Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Helping to Make Math “Graspable,” WPI Researchers Guide Design of Algebra Tool for Students and Teachers. “Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have received a $185,085 subcontract for the second phase of design development and testing of Graspable Math, a digital platform that helps students learn algebra…. Students have traditionally worked algebraic equations by making notations on paper, but Graspable Math puts algebra onto tablet and laptop screens. Students click on or swipe numbers and symbols to solve equations and get instantaneous feedback on their actions, while teachers can monitor their work.”
Lifehacker: Use Wolfram Alpha to Conceptualize Giant Numbers
Lifehacker: Use Wolfram Alpha to Conceptualize Giant Numbers. “Our monkey brains didn’t evolve to understand big numbers without some help. So when you run into an abstract figure, it’s good to have some real-world thing to compare it to. That’s why I memorize a few stats about the U.S. population; that’s why we made a video comparing Jeff Bezos’s money to Beyoncé’s. When you need to visualize a certain number, large or small, search it on Wolfram Alpha, and you’ll get a comparison to some real-world objects.”
