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POPSA Math Romance Top Ten Things That Math and Sex Have in Common 10. Explicit discussions of either topic is a faux pas at most cocktail parties. 9. Historically, men have been in control, but there are now efforts to get women more involved. 8. There are many joint results. 7. Both are prominent on college campuses, and are usually practiced indoors. 6. Most people wish they knew more about both subjects. 5. Both involve long and hard problems, and can produce interesting topology and geometry. 4. Both merit undivided attention, but mathematicians are prone to think about one while doing the other. 3. Saint Augustine was hostile to both, and Alan Turing took an unusual approach to both. 2. Both typically begin with a lot of hard work and end with a great but brief reward. 1. Professionals are generally viewed with suspicion, and most do not earn high pay.
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POPSThink you're anonymous online? Don't count on it
More: That might not sound like a big deal until one considers an example: "First, we can immediately find his political orientation based on his strong opinions about Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times and Fahrenheit 9/11. Strong guesses about his religious views can be made based on his ratings on Jesus of Nazareth and The Gospel of John. He did not like Super Size Me at all; perhaps this implies something about his physical size? Both items that we found with predominantly gay themes, Bent and Queer as folk were rated one star out of five. He is a cultish follower of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This is far from all we found about this one person, but having made our point, we will spare the reader further lurid details."…Back in 2000, a Carnegie Mellon researcher took a look at 1990 US census data and concluded that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified based on only three items: ZIP code, gender, and date of birth.
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POPS248-Dimensional Mathematical Map Calculated "The calculation was known to be possible in principle, but it was thought to be hopeless in practice," says Adams. "But four years ago a group of us said let's really try to do it. We're pretty sure we've got it right, but it's hard to be 100% sure." "It's probably one of the most complicated pure mathematical calculations anyone's ever done," says Stewart. "Each entry is difficult to calculate — it's amazing they managed to do this."
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POPSNew Math For Analyzing Evolutionary Trees "What this tells me is that you don't know what kind of mathematics is going to be useful to biology," Billera says. "It wasn't clear before this that geometry and topology would be useful to biology. Who would think they had anything to do with each other?" Ernst Haeckel's classic hand-drawn diagram is just for fun—it's one of those wonderful diagrams that functions as both science and art.
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POPSFoundations of Mathematics-Proofs The site is an 'Extensive Mathematics resource.' I have clipped a section on proofs, with is intriguing, but there are detailed descriptions, of other strands of mathematics, as seen in the link at the top of the clip
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POPS"Perelman's Song" - A Mathematical-Fiction Short Story The audience for "Math-Fi" may not be large, but author Tina Chang obviously had a lot of fun with this cute story and managed to elucidate some of the topological ideas involved in Perelman's recent landmark proof of the longstanding Poincaré conjecture. For background see Rob's clip: Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery .
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