NewsFusion | 020

NewsFusion for March 2016

Science...

• Math professor solves 300 year old Fermat's Last Theorem, wins $700,000
• 17 year old student to join Mars Desert Research Station project in Utah to try out life on Mars | Brown Daily Herald
• Pluto just keeps getting more interesting | NBC News

Design...

• José Neves' Farfetch may be future of fashion | Financial Times
• Finland's fabulous modern wood architecture | Metropolis Magazine
• Graphic designers display their thoughts on Trump | Fast Company Design

Culture...

• Its not JUST a party, sophisticated ways to celebrate St. Patricks Day | Wall Street Journal Blog
• Even in Detroit, Irish culture and traditions going strong | The Detroit News
• The inside scoop on leprechauns, Ireland's mythic fairies | Mental Floss

Cocktails and Constants

Manhattans will never be the same...from now on, they'll make you smarter. These cocktail Math Glasses feature mathematical constants and arithmetical formulas that won't let your mind dull for a minute when enjoying your favorite libation. Impress your friends with a toast to/with Pythagoras's constant, Pi, Phi,or Euler's Number.

Maryam Mirzakhani Wins Fields Medal

The equation for getting young women interested in math just got simplified. In August 2014, Stanford Math Professor Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal. Considered the Nobel of prize of mathematics, it is the the first time a female has received the award in it's 80 year history, as well as the first time an Iranian has won the medal.

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• Carey, B. 2014. Stanford's Maryam Mirzakhani wins Fields Medal. Stanford News
• Chang, K. 2014. Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner. The New York Times
• Coy, P. 2014. How to do math like medal-winning a genius. Business Week
• Dehghan, S. K. 2014. Iranian president tweets bare-headed photo of Maryam Mirzakhani. The Guardian
• Moyer, J. 2014. A woman wins ‘Nobel Prize of math’ for the first time. The Washington Post
• Sample, I. 2014. Fields Medal mathematics prize won by woman for first time in its history.The Guardian

Futurazzi | Danica McKellar at 2014 Billboard Music Awards

Our favorite math maven, Danica McKellar caught the attention of many a fashion photographer when she arrived to the 2014 Billboard Music Awards in this bright poppy sleeveless cutout gown from BCBG. The dress has a very futuristic vibe overall but we also adore the fact that there are some great geometric lines in the front and back cutouts as well.

Statistics Superstar

The 2012 election season will go down in history as one to remember for many reasons. One surprising reason is that, at least for the presidential election, the results were completely predictable. How you ask? You'll have to go to statistician Nate Silver for the answer. By using copious amounts of data, sophisticated math and statistical models, and then letting the objective numbers tell the story, Silver correctly predicted the presidential winner for 50 out of the 50 states. In 2008 he did the same for 49 out of 50 states, leaving a little room for improvement.

Silver, who was already well known for his statistics work in politics and sports has now become a household name and a bit of a celebrity, appearing a broad swath of TV and radio shows. You can follow Silver's ongoing work and commentary on his New York Times blog, FiveThirtyEight that offers lots of data crunching on politics, sports, science, and pop culture.

Smart Stars | Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar is an American actress, author and math education ambassador. Many know her from her role as Winnie Cooper in the TV show The Wonder Years and subsequent acting career while others know her best as a New York Times bestselling author of her books promoting math to girls and young women which include Math Doesn't Suck, Kiss My Math, Hot X: Algebra Exposed, and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape. McKellar's math cred comes from her 1998 degree in mathematics from UCLA, where she graduated summa cum laude. While at university, McKellar co-authored a paper with fellow student, Brandy Winn, and their Professor Lincoln Chayes on the 'Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem'. McKellar's Erdős number is four and her Bacon number is two giving her an incredibly low Erdős-Bacon number of six.

From The Wonder Years to a becoming a wonder-Mom and role model, we give her an A+ for all her hard work promoting math to girls and young women. You go girl!

McKellar was named our Queen of the Smart Set for 2016.

>> Follow Danica McKellar on Future-ish.

Lets Solve This

I've been seeing quite a few TV ads on the ExxonMobile Let's Solve This campaign. In 2009, the Program for International Students Assessment ranked U.S. students 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. The Let's Solve This aims to address the situation by partnering with multiple programs and organizations aimed promoting science and math among students, teachers, and parents. The primary partnership is with the National Math and Science Initiative which has a special focus on teacher training.

Kudos to ExxonMobile for their support and efforts of these programs. More kudos for placing national ad campaigns and science and math in mainstream, primetime media.

Artistic Equations | Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere Exhibit

"O Paraiso", 2011. Beatriz Milhazes.
A new transdisciplinary exhibit of math and art recently opened at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. Titled Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere, the exhibit offers visitors “a sudden change of scenery” in the words of mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck. The exhibit was developed with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) under the patronage of UNESCO and utilized IHÉS mathematicians and scientists to curate diverse works from many artists, including some celebrities such as David Lynch and Patti Smith. The exhibit runs October 2011 to March 2012.

Beer Suds for the Smart Set

Raise a pint to pi...literally. With the Pi Pint Glass from theUncommonGreen, you're guaranteed to get smarter with each sip of your favorite stout, pilsner, or porter. Guaranteed because pi (π), the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter, is etched on the vessel...to several hundred digits.

Culturomics of Science, Design, and Culture

Apparently you can teach old dogs new tricks. The humanities just got a fancy new method of conducting historical analysis of documents by observing the frequency of words in archived documents using Google Books, culturomics. Leading the charge is mathematician Jean-Baptiste Michel in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Michel and several co-authors recently published Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books in the January 14, 2011 issue of Science Magazine. Since making the front page of the New York Times, the arts & sciences have been in a tizzy thinking about all the new research opportunities. One project that used the tool was The Science Hall of Fame created and curated by Adrian Veres and John Bohannon on the AAAS website, Science, that lists the frequency of scientists in the digital book database using 'milliDarwins' as they comparable unit of measurement.

We ran our own little word search using Google Labs Book Ngram Viewer and came up with the above graph indicating the frequency of 'science, design, and culture' in the digital database. According to this graph, we were quite enlightened at the turn of the millennium but not so much after the big event. Try it out, let the kids take it for a spin, and see how your favorite people and words have fared in the written word over the last 200 years or so.

2010 Fields Medal - Monuments of Mathmatics

The 2010 Fields Medal was announced on August 19, 2010 in Hyderabad, India by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). Considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the 2010 medals went to Elon Lindenstrauss, Stanislav Smirnov, Cédric Villani, and Ngô Bảo Châu.

Sensuous math

A new movie is making its way around the world helping us understand the many variables that make up the equation of love. Edward Frenkel's film Rites of Love and Math made its debut in Paris but has since visited Spain and San Francisco on its global tour and it continues to find more and more fans along the way.

Danica McKellar on Kiss My Math

Actress Danica McKellar talks about her latest book Kiss My Math and 'making math girly'. Apologies to Danica for the tragically unflattering image above for this YouTube video.