We Use Math Blog

"A generation ago, quants turned finance upside down. Now they’re mapping out ad campaigns and building new businesses from mountains of personal data"

"Neal Goldman is a math entrepreneur. He works on Wall Street, where numbers rule. But he’s focusing his analytic tools on a different realm altogether: the world of words."

"Goldman’s startup, Inform Technologies LLC, is a robotic librarian. Every day it combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts in English. It reads them and groups them with related pieces. Inform doesn’t do this work alphabetically or by keywords. It uses algorithms to analyze each article by its language and context. It then sends customized news feeds to its users, who also exist in Inform’s system as — you guessed it — math."

Read full article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm

"A number puzzle originating in the work of self-taught maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan nearly a century ago has been solved. The solution may one day lead to advances in particle physics and computer security."

Read full article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7180

In 1611, after having studies how sailors stack cannonballs, Johannes Kepler began pondering over the most efficient way to pack spheres in a given space. He finally decided on the face-centred cubic, which is the same way you will find oranges stacked today.

However, Kepler could not prove that the face-centered cubic was indeed the most efficient way to pack spheres. Until recently this problem remained unsolved. After over a decade of research, testing all the possible solutions, Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan concluded that Kepler’s method, the face-centred cubic, was indeed the most efficient way to stack spheres, meaning that the amount of space occupied by the spheres is maximized in the proposed arrangement. Referees have declared they are 99 percent sure the Hale’s solution is correct.

http://www.simonsingh.net/Sphere_Packing.html

Do you want to go into business?  Did you know that a major in mathematics is a great preparation for business school?  Mathematics majors consistently outscore almost every other major on the GMAT, the graduate business school entrance exam.

In fact, Dmitri Kuksov, a professor of marketing at the Olin School of Business says

“Math… is possibly the best undergraduate background to get into business schools”

Steven Wheelwright, former professor at the Harvard Business School, and now president of BYU-Hawaii says,

“Mathematics provided an approach to problem solving and analysis that has continued to be of great help to me in my academic and business career.  It has also been of great benefit as I have tackled both research projects and consulting projects involving data analysis and statistics.  And it was where I started my academic teaching career – and then provided a foundation as I moved into Operations Strategy and New Product Development.”

Do you want to be a lawyer? Did you know that a major in mathematics is a great preparation for law school? Mathematics majors consistently outscore almost every other major on the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Test.