With the recent announcement that Bill Miller will be stepping down from running Legg Mason Value Trust fund, a number of people have used this as an opportunity to re-examine his incredible fifteen year streak of beating the S&P 500. Running from 1991 to 2006, this record has never been matched. However, in recent years, [...]
Category Archives: Math
America’s Age, Empires, and Mathematics
I had a piece in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe this weekend about understanding the nature of empires and civilizations, seen through the lens of mathematics, entitled How Long Will America Last? An impossible question, answered with math: With all the chatter about the rise of China, our possible economic collapse, and climate [...]
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Bad Math about Infertility in the WSJ
From the Wall Street Journal: Infertility, defined as the inability to conceive after one year of unprotected sex, affects one in six couples of childbearing age in the U.S. In 40% of cases, the problem is with the man; in 40% it’s with the woman, and in 20%, something is amiss with both, say Zev [...]
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Gaussian Genealogy: Math Masters Trace Their Intellectual Lineage
For my first piece in Wired (June issue, page 56, if you’re playing at home), I explored the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which examines the academic lineage of mathematicians and is well-known to all mathematically-inclined academics. For example, play with my “family” tree for awhile, and you’ll find a lot of academic inbreeding. For Wired, I [...]
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Cultural Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
In evolutionary biology, there is a now-discredited idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” In other words, the development of an organism follows its evolutionary history. Human embryos look like they have gills because people evolved from fish, we have tails in utero because of the same origins, and so forth. In a recent paper in PLoS [...]
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Applied Math at the Movies (including supplement)
This morning I had an article entitled The Mysterious Equilibrium of Zombies in the Boston Globe Ideas section about applied math in movies. I mentioned a number of movies, math and articles. For those who are interested in more details, here are some references, film clips and stills: Casino Royale and Fractals The fractal it looks like is [...]
Also posted in Boston Globe, Harry Potter, Ideas, Movie, Networks, Science Comments closed
Our City Article in ‘New Scientist’
Our new article (available on the arXiv and submitted to Phys. Rev. E), which discusses a mathematical network model to explain the superlinear scaling of innovation and productivity in cities, was profiled in a brief piece in New Scientist.
Braess’s Paradox
Braess’s Paradox, named after Dietrich Braess, is when you add roads or capacity for cars, and thereby worsen traffic (or alternatively, you lower traffic costs by removing roads). Formally, this simply means that the current traffic equilibrium state is not the optimal one. Dietrich Braess, on his website, notes that this concept has applications to [...]
Also posted in Complexity, Ideas, People, Science, Traffic Comments closed
Gibrat’s Law
Gibrat’s Law states that the proportionate growth of a city (or corporation or other social entity) is independent of its size. Here’s an example from Economy Professor: If a company with sales of $10m doubles in size over a period of time, it is likely the same will happen for a company beginning with sales [...]
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