Rest in peace John Nash

Very sad news today about John Forbes Nash, Jr. and his wife Alicia, who perished in an automobile accident last night in New Jersey.

I read A Beautiful Mind several years ago, and then again during research while writing my own book (even though Nash suffered from schizophrenia and not bipolar disorder).  However it was that the movie portrayed the hell that he went through, his real-life ordeal was much, much worse.  But he endured, and triumphed wildly.  His work in game theory - even as a graduate student - revolutionized economics and ultimately led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994.  I wish I had even a fraction of the mind to really appreciate the work that Nash pulled off throughout his long and brilliant career.

Thoughts and prayers going out to their family.

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Mathematicians model zombie attack and survival odds

"Hit hard and hit often." That's the conclusion reached by a group of Canadian mathematicians who have produced a model of epidemic rates of a hypothetical zombie attack and how one might be survived.

According to the researchers, an infestation in a city of 500,000 people would find the living outnumbered by the undead within three days. However, a strategy of "impulsive eradication" adopted early enough would be adequate to deal with the crisis.

It is good to know such things, yes?

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The time-traveling physics of BACK TO THE FUTURE

The staff of Overthinking It has been celebrating an entire week devoted to the Back to the Future trilogy, of which among the highlights is this exhaustive look at the science and physics of how time travel works in the movie series. There's stuff so dense in this article, that even I can barely comprehend it (then again, I've always sucked at more complex math... and there's a ton of it in this essay).

That's all well and good, fellas. And congrats on all the hard work you poured into this. But what I'd really like to know is: when can we expect to see Mr. Fusion on the store shelves? :-)

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German schoolboy corrects NASA's math on killer asteroid odds

A 13-year old schoolboy named Nico Marquardt has found errors in NASA's calculations about the Apophis asteroid. And NASA has conceded that the lad from Berlin, Germany is correct. Marquardt found that that Earth now stands a much higher chance of getting hit by Apophis than originally determined by NASA. How much was the multi-billion dollar space agency off by? It said that the odds of a collision with Apophis were 1 in 45,000. After Marquardt's "peer review", it now turns out that the odds are 1 in 450.

I have to tip my hat to Marquardt. Math was never my big thing, and I tried to calculate the physics of astronomical objects during a class at Elon and didn't do too well either. He's probably got a bright future ahead of him... provided that we don't get hit by any big space rocks anytime soon :-)

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Ever seen a 248-dimensional object?

You have now...Here's the story about what this... thing... is:

This is a 2-dimensional projection of E8, a 248-dimensional object seen here simplified into only 8-dimensions to help preserve sanity. Essentially, if I understand it correctly, it’s like a 2-D shadow of a 248-D sphere, an object so symmetrical you could theoretically rotate it in any direction in up to 248 dimensions and it still appear the same. Talk about a stick in the mud. It took 18 mathematicians four years to produce the calculation for this object, its formula weighing in at 60 gigabytes. The computation was announced at MIT by David Vogan this Monday, the 19th of March, 2007.

So it took four years for 18 mathematicians to come up with... something that looks like it was made with an old Spirograph set?

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this one, folks. Here's a page that has a lot more about it though.

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