March 2014 - mathfun@mailman.xmission.com

[math-fun] blood
by Bill Gosper 03 Mar '14

03 Mar '14

Various sites claim our body creates (and destroys) about 2 million erythrocytes/sec. Yesterday, I had a kid compute the correction increment required for his growth. I think we overshot by a factor of 2 by using a (presumably adult) count of 2*10^13, getting about 63000/sec. This roughly coincides with the total of vertebrate species, all but 25 of which have erythrocytes! Do see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channichthyidae. It's enough to warm the subzero heart of a Creationist. --rwg

1 0

Re: [math-fun] Springer, IEEE remove more than 120 papers
by Henry Baker 03 Mar '14

03 Mar '14

Too bad that Springer won't remove the much large number of gibberish papers in Springer "journals" that (more embarrassingly) weren't computer-generated -- except insofar as they excelled at pushing the limits of TeX. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law At 01:09 PM 3/2/2014, Warren D Smith wrote: >More than 120 Computer-Generated Papers Removed by Springer and IEEE > >The Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers >(IEEE) have withdrawn more than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering >Papers after they discovered that they were computer-generated. An >investigation by Cyril Labbe, computer scientist of Joseph Fourier >University in Grenoble, France, resulted into list of >computer-generated papers which were published in more than 30 >conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013.

2 2

[math-fun] Springer, IEEE remove more than 120 papers (News story)
by Warren D Smith 03 Mar '14

03 Mar '14

More than 120 Computer-Generated Papers Removed by Springer and IEEE The Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) have withdrawn more than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering Papers after they discovered that they were computer-generated. An investigation by Cyril Labbe, computer scientist of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, resulted into list of computer-generated papers which were published in more than 30 conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. The published papers were based on proceedings on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering by the 2013 International Conference held in Chengdu, China. Cyril discovered that most of the computer generated papers were generated using computer program designed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005. In order to test the review process for conferences, students created a program, SCIgen, which could create fake research papers. Students also submitted similar SCIgen paper to raise awareness among of unsound procedures among public. It has been reported that the Open-access journals publish fake research papers for some money. Cyril cited an example of an incident which took place in 2009, in which a graduate student paid $80 to the Journal to publish fake computer-generated paper. A website was created by Cyril in 2012 to detect SCIgen papers by searching for words typically used by the program, which resulted in 85 fake papers that were published in IEEE. Earlier some issues were raised with Ike Antkare, Google Scholar, when he was declared as the 21st most-cited scientist in the world, despite he did not published even a single research paper. The Cyril and the Springer will search for more 2,200 journals and 8,400 books to identify fake SCIgen articles. --end.

2 1

Re: [math-fun] Question about uniform distribution (mod 1) of a sequence
by Adam P. Goucher 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

Vaguely plausible? They fall down at the obstacle of that theorem whose name I can't remember (and far too inebriated to Google) which states that (rational)^(algebraic) is transcendental. Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Keith F. Lynch > Sent: 03/02/14 11:19 PM > To: math-fun(a)mailman.xmission.com > Subject: Re: [math-fun] Question about uniform distribution (mod 1) of a sequence > > Dan Asimov <dasimov(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > > It was especially the famous case of 163 that got me thinking: > > I first heard of it in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column > in the April 1975 Scientific American, in which he claimed that > exp(pi*sqrt(163)) had recently been proven to be an integer. > > It was a joke article, and made several other equally false but > vaguely plausible claims. > > _______________________________________________ > math-fun mailing list > math-fun(a)mailman.xmission.com > http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun

4 4

Re: [math-fun] Question about uniform distribution (mod 1) of a sequence
by Keith F. Lynch 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

"Adam P. Goucher" <apgoucher(a)gmx.com> wrote: > Vaguely plausible? They fall down at the obstacle of that theorem > whose name I can't remember (and far too inebriated to Google) which > states that (rational)^(algebraic) is transcendental. Vaguely plausible to a teenager, which I was at the time. If I recall correctly, I realized the article was a joke by the time I finished reading it. I think it was the "disproof" of special relativity that did it. Even then, I knew that special relativity, unlike general relativity, was known to be mathematically self- consistent. In other words, it could be proven wrong by physical experiment, but not by thought experiment or mathematical reasoning. Had the article only mentioned exp(pi*sqrt(163)), I would have believed it, since, like many teenagers, I hadn't yet heard of the Lindemann-Weierstrass theorem.

1 0

Re: [math-fun] Question about uniform distribution (mod 1) of a sequence
by Keith F. Lynch 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

Dan Asimov <dasimov(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > It was especially the famous case of 163 that got me thinking: I first heard of it in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in the April 1975 Scientific American, in which he claimed that exp(pi*sqrt(163)) had recently been proven to be an integer. It was a joke article, and made several other equally false but vaguely plausible claims.

2 2

[math-fun] (no subject)
by Eugene Salamin 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

Yahoo mail messed up the formatting, so here is a corrected version. Gelfond–Schneider theorem: If a and b are algebraic numbers with a ≠ 0,1 and if b is not a rational number, then any value of a^b is a transcendental number. -- Gene

1 0

[math-fun] exp(pi*sqrt(n))
by Warren D Smith 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

p = 4*a(1) m = 2.0 define v(x) { if(x<0) return(-x) else return(x) } t = 2 for(n=1; n<999999999999; n++){ y = sqrt(n)*p; x = v(s(p*e(y))); if(x<m){ m=x; print n, " ", m, "\n"; } if(n>=t){ t = t*2; print "reached ", n, "\n"; } } is a bc program which tries to compute the sequence 1, 2, 6, 17, 22, 25, 37, 58, 163, ... aka http://oeis.org/A069014 (You need to preset scale=something large before running it). This is very slow. Presumably, the next entry in the sequence is of order n=10^12 and would require computing the fractional part of a number having about 10^6 digits before the decimal point. This seems infeasible to reach unless way smarter algorithms can be invented. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)

2 2

[math-fun] Macroscopic Verification of the Casimir Effect
by Fred Lunnon 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

Macroscopic Verification of the Casimir Effect **************************************************** Apparatus: One large bowl of hot vegetable broth, home-made by an excellent cook supplied with a rather mischievous sense of humour [the cook, not the soup], and consequently equipped with a number of small but vicious pale-green chilies [the soup, not the cook]. [Or maybe both, come to think of it.] One soup-spoon, one hungry scientist; one heavily-shielded ultramicrotome. Method: Dissect the chilies into slices sufficiently fine to avoid permanent damage to sensitive mucous membranes (approximately one micron thick is recommended), then distribute the slices uniformly throughout the broth. Supply broad-spectrum wave energy via vigorous miscegnation using spoon. Sample a random spoonful. Results: Observe that the entire complement of slices has counter-intuitively re-coalesced within the sample. Note how quantum-relativistic effects (which remain incompletely understood) ensure that the observation is delayed until approximately one microsecond after mastication has been completed, when the wave-function collapses, followed after a short interval by a substantial proportion of the apparatus. Conclusion: Eye-watering. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper Fred Lunnon

1 0

Re: [math-fun] Question about uniform distribution (mod 1) of a sequence
by Adam P. Goucher 02 Mar '14

02 Mar '14

> Hmm, interesting — I’d heard of 22 and 58, but not of 6, 25, 37. > > It was especially the famous case of 163 that got me thinking: > If the sequence of frac(Q(n)), n=1,2,3, is uniformly distributed > in [0,1] then the sequence of recordholders n_k must be infinite. Indeed. A weaker assumption is that frac(Q(n)) is dense in [0,1]; this may be amenable to ergodic theory. Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher > —Dan > > > On Mar 1, 2014, at 7:40 PM, Fred W. Helenius <fredh(a)ix.netcom.com> wrote: > > > On 3/1/2014 4:02 PM, Dan Asimov wrote: > >> Question: > >> > >> Let Q(n) := exp(pi*sqrt(n)) for n = 1,2,3,…. > >> > >> What can be said about the distribution of > >> the sequence frac(Q(n)) = Q(n) (mod 1) ??? > >> > >> Since my next birthday, #n, satisfies > >> exp(pi*sqrt(n)) is close to an integer, > >> I was wondering what the sequence > >> (letting f(x) := min{frac(x),1-frac(x)} > >> be the distance of x to its nearest integer): > >> > >> n_1 = 1, and > >> > >> n_(k+1) := min{n | f(Q(n))) < f(Q(n_k))} > >> > >> looks like. I.e., n for which f(Q(x)) is > >> a record low. > > > > The sequence of integers yielding record lows is oeis.org/A069014 . > > Apparently no further value is known that beats 163, so the sequence > > shows only nine terms: 1, 2, 6, 17, 22, 25, 37, 58, 163. > > > _______________________________________________ > math-fun mailing list > math-fun(a)mailman.xmission.com > http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun

1 0