Column
- Math
Mathematician answers Supreme Court plea
New, fair method for dividing states into congressional districts could reduce political squabbles.
- Humans
Nation needs recovery plan for science faculty jobs
Over the past few months, many graduate students and postdocs have been receiving letters from department chairs apologetically explaining that the faculty job search at Institution X has been canceled. State and private universities are facing declining tax revenues and falling endowments, and are unwilling to raise tuition on newly impoverished families. From Harvard to […]
- Life
Darwin: The reluctant mathematician
Despite disliking mathematics, the great biologist inadvertently advanced statistics.
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Receding glaciers erase records of climate history
For three decades, Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University has been monitoring the health of glaciers atop mountains from Peru to China . Skeptics initially doubted that he could retrieve meaningful data from these remote elevations. But he has, while also discovering that these millennia-old data-storage lockers are rapidly disappearing. Senior Editor Janet Raloff recently […]
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- Earth
Obama administration should lead energy transition
R.K. Pachauri, an engineer and economist by training, is director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India, and a corecipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC periodically issues consensus reports on the science of climate change. Senior editor Janet Raloff spoke with him about changes he hopes to see from the Obama administration.
- Math
The happiness virus
Two studies apply social networking ideas to data from health studies of thousands of people, and suggest different interpretations of how contagious happiness or other experiences can be.
- Math
Traveler’s Dilemma: When it’s smart to be dumb
Some game theory paradoxes can be resolved by assuming that people adopt multiple personae, and aren’t rational.
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