The Math Factor speaks with Michael Huber about, among other things, how he came up with the idea for the book Mythematics in which he uses the 12 labors of Hercules as a jumping off point for a series of mathematical problems. Turns out a visit to the MET inspired him to research the labors and eventually to write the book.

Listen in to Steve Strogatz discussing his friendship with his high school mathematics teacher Don Joffray on WNYC’s RadioLab. Their relationship was conducted mostly by letters and shared love of mathematical problems. As WNYC notes, “Steve explains how numbers can connect you and where they fall short.”

Also, WNYC linked through to this video of Steve making a presentation. It is very touching and shows lots of the letters.

How long would it take to fall through the Earth and land on the other side?

Listen in to the latest podcast of The Math Factor for an interview with Paul Nahin who is a frequent PUP author. In this segment he is discussing his most recent book Mrs. Perkins’s Electric Quilt. And yes — he has the answer to the question above.

We’re thrilled that The Math Factor had Paul on, and look forward to their upcoming interview with Mythematics author, Mike Huber, too.

The Harvard Gazette reports that Gary King and Marc Kirschner have been named University Professors.

So, what’s a University Professor? According to the article, this title is reserved for “individuals of distinction … working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.”

Currently, there are only 22 University Professors at Harvard so Princeton University Press is proud to congratulate Gary King on this wonderful honor. King is a three-time Princeton University Press author and most recently co-authored Demographic Forecasting with Federico Girosi. He is also, as we learned from the article, a former professional magician proficient in “doing magic, escapes, and juggling.”

Read the complete article at The Harvard Gazette.

My pick this week from Mariana Cook’s new book MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World is a photographic portrait of Fields Medal winner Simon Donaldson.  His area of expertise is differential and algebraic geometry and teaches at the the Imperial College London.  Simon’s subtle smile makes it seem like he knows something that I don’t-and can prove it with those perplexing equations in the background!  Enjoy!

Another “DeSio Pick” from Mariana Cooks’s new book MATHEMATICIANS: An Outher View of the Inner World Princeton University mathematician JÁNOS KOLLÁR poses here amongst the ivy, probably somewhere on the Princeton campus.  This photograph captures what I envision many mathematicians to be–perfectly happy sitting alone with their thoughts, thinking of new equations (and in Janos’s case, algebraic geometry!)

Just getting in the spirit over the publication of Mariana Cook’s moving new book MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World, a remarkable collection of 92 black-and-white photographic portraits of some of the most renowned mathematicians of our time.  Our friends at SEEDMagazine.com have posted a multimedia slideshow featuring text to accompany each portrait and 5 audio interviews with select mathematicians.  Great stuff!

I also wanted to post a few of my personal favorites from MATHEMATICIANS (which, by the way, would make a great gift for any budding math enthusiast!)  Today’s selection is a portrait of Shing-Tung Yau, Fields Medal winner and professor of mathematics at Harvard University.

Sharon Begley has a terrific piece on Newsweek.com about the just-published THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME 12, The Berlin Years: Correspondence: January-December 1921, edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes, and the Einstein Papers Project.  You can read this piece here.

The sixth and final in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Theorem’s Implications for Science and Philosophy. In physics, Conway shows us, it the Free Will Theorem shows that there can be no mechanistic explanation for the “collapse of the wave function,” and so provides the strongest refutation of the “hidden variable” theories. Philosophically, Conway shows us the theorem leads us to infer that the future really is affected by free will decisions.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed our series of questions about mathematics and climate study to Tapio Schneider, a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Schneider conducts research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate changes, turbulence, and turbulent transport in the atmosphere and oceans. He is also co-editor with Adam H. Sobel of the PUP book The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Tapio Schneider: I am working on theories of how large-scale (>1000 km) atmospheric turbulence influences the global climate. For example, we study how turbulent transport affects tropical circulations and how it controls the distribution of atmospheric water vapor and rainfall.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

TS: I am fascinated by how nature works. I was trained as a physicist and loved how physics helped explain the inanimate world around me, from refrigerators to cell phones to the blue color of the sky and the red color of sunsets. I particularly like the physics of everyday phenomena—phenomena that occur roughly at the energy of sunlight (for example, many quantum phenomena occur at the energy of sunlight, and in part because of that, quantum devices such as the transistor revolutionized our life). When I was looking for a research area for graduate studies, I was looking for a young field with open questions to which young scientists can make lasting and fundamental contributions. Atmospheric dynamics is such a field—and the phenomena certainly occur at the energy of sunlight!

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we asked Angela and George Shiflet about their current research and the impact mathematics can have on climate science. The Shiflets first met in a university calculus class, and eventually married. Today, they both are Wofford faculty members. George Shiflet is the Dr. Larry Hearn McCalla professor of biology and chair of the department. Also a department chair, Angela Shiflet is the McCalla professor of computer science and mathematics as well as coordinator of the computational science program. The Shiflets have collaborated to develop computational modules for the Keck Foundation and together they have authored Introduction to Computational Science: Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Angela and George Shiflet: We are continuing to write computational science educational modules,  discussing applying mathematics and computer science to science problems.  In particular, we are writing about modeling using matrices and graph theory.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

AGS: With George being a biologist and Angela being a mathematician and computer scientist, interest in computational science is a natural for us!  Little did we know when we met in calculus class in college and operated on rats together in physiology that we were beginning to lay the foundation of a mutual interest in computational science education.