“… an admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations.” — Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) on logarithms At the start of the pandemic — seems so long ago! — the media showed us […]
Math
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HSU Expanding Curriculum with Polytechnic Push
As a way of prioritizing Humboldt State University’s push to become polytechnic, the university is expanding its curriculum to include more STEM-related degree programs as soon as fall of 2023. “This is what a 21st-century education looks like: programs where students build the skills to have meaningful careers and a nuanced understanding of society’s complex […]
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How to Trust Strangers
We live in a society in which we interact with thousands of other individuals we don’t personally know, yet we have to trust those interactions. Every time we use a credit card, for instance, we’re relying on a network of anonymous people to ensure the payment we’re sending is, in fact, made honestly and free […]
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How to Win $1 Million
It’s simple. Prove the Goldbach Conjecture: Every even integer greater than two is the sum of two primes. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Figure it out and you’ll win a cool mil from the Clay Mathematics Institute, and you’ll probably get a Fields Medal — the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize as long as […]
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UPDATED: Kim Bergel’s Slim, Slim Chance
UPDATE: Hold the phone! Kim Bergel’s chances of unseating Eureka Councilman Mike Newman for his Ward 3 seat just got a fair bit chunkier. When the Journal spoke to Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich after midnight, she estimated 1,000 or so ballots may have been dropped off at the Humboldt County Elections Office […]
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‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics’
OK, quick (and ancient) puzzle to get us going, so please cover up the next paragraph before you answer. Alice and Bob take turns throwing seven dice. Alice will win as soon as every die lands the same; Bob will win the first time every die lands differently. Who wins? Alice, right? Since only six […]
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A Funny Thing Happened to Pi …
The history of pi, or π (= 3.1416 …) the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is in some (very rough) way the history of mathematics, starting with the empirical age of math. Four thousand years ago, the only way to get a value for π was to physically measure it, […]