Graduate student John Urschel appears on the Scientific American podcast My Favorite Theorem, where he shares his love of a theorem for graph theory developed by Daniel Spielman. Urschel points out that Spielman is “one of the first people to give provable guarantees for algorithms that can solve a Laplacian system of equations in near linear time.”
Cindy Atoji Keene of The Boston Globe speaks with MIT alumnus Niman Kenkre, who has been a high-stakes professional poker player for 12 years. Crediting his mathematic skills and sense of human psychology for his success, Kenkre says, “a player who relies only on mathematics will miss many important psychological cues relating to player frequencies and tendencies.”
MIT graduate student John Urschel describes the appeal of chess to HuffPost's Zach Young. "You might think someone who spends his days studying Laplacian eigenvectors would pick a hobby that’s a little more restful on the brain," writes Young. "But for Urschel, the appeal of math and the appeal of chess are very similar."
Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Fox writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining whether math games can be beneficial in helping children learn. The researchers found that, “children who played math games consistently showed a better grasp of the concepts…but that understanding did not appear to help in elementary school.”
New Scientist reporter Evelyn Wang writes that a study by MIT researchers finds that, “the question of whether a scrambled Rubik’s cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what’s called NP-complete – that’s maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve.”
MIT was named the top university in the world for the sixth consecutive year in the QS World University Rankings, reports Kyle Scott Clauss for Boston Magazine.
Joshua Cassidy of KQED highlights an MIT study about how cats use their tongues to drink. The researchers created a model that mimics how cats drink and determined that “house cats tend to lap water about four times a second while larger species of cats, like lions and tigers, lap slower as their body mass increases.”
In this episode of NOVA that explores how origami is being used in scientific innovations, Prof. Erik Demaine speaks about his work applying math to create new origami figures. “It’s mind blowing that the simple operation of folding lets you transform a boring square of paper into super complicated, crazy 3-D shapes," he explains.
Research by Prof. Erik Demaine looks to find the best method for wrapping spherical objects, writes Sophie Bushwick for Popular Science. By examining how an Austrian candy maker wraps round candies, Demaine found that foil is the best material as “it makes lots of little tiny crinkles, or folds.”
Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson writes that four MIT students - Matthew Cavuto, Zachary Hulcher, Kevin Zhou and Daniel Zuo - have been named recipients of the prestigious Marshall scholarships. The MIT group is “the largest delegation of Marshall Scholars named this year from a single school.”
Michael Rosenwald of The Washington Post writes about John Urschel, an MIT graduate student and Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman, and his love for math and football. “I’m living an amazing quality of life. I get to play football. I get to play math. I get to play chess,” Urschel says.
MIT has been named the top university in the world in the latest QS World University Rankings, reports Nick Morrison for Forbes. This is the fifth consecutive year that MIT has earned the number one spot in the QS rankings.
MIT researchers have developed a new system for protecting patient privacy in genomic databases, reports Anna Nowogrodzki for Nature. The system “masks the donor's identity by adding a small amount of noise, or random variation, to the results it returns on a user’s query,” Nowogrodzki explains.
In an article for Wired, Kevin Hartnett examines Prof. Scott Sheffield’s work studying geometric randomness. “You take the most natural objects—trees, paths, surfaces—and you show they’re all related to each other,” Sheffield explains. “And once you have these relationships, you can prove all sorts of new theorems you couldn’t prove before.”
The curved origami sculptures created by Prof. Erik Demaine and his father Martin Demaine are featured in the exhibit “Above the Fold: New Expressions in Origami,” writes Solvej Schou for the Associated Press. The father-son duo use math algorithms to solve paper-folding problems. "Our work grows directly out of our decades collaborating together in mathematics and sculpture," explains Prof. Demaine.