I'm Gina Smith

The fastest human calculator does it again!

LONDON (AFP) - The world's fastest human calculator on Tuesday broke his own record for working out a 200-digit number using nothing but brain power to produce the answer in just over 70 seconds. Alexis Lemaire, a 27-year-old Frenchman, correctly calculated the 13th root of a random 200-digit number from a possible 393 trillion answers.

The so-called 'mathlete' produced the answer of 2,407,899,893,032,210 in 70.2 seconds, beating his previous record of 72.4 seconds, at London's Science Museum.

A computer was used to produce a random 200-digit number before he sat down to calculate the answer in his head.

The museum's curator of mathematics, Jane Wess, said: "He sat down and it was all very quiet -- and all of a sudden he amazingly just cracked it.

"I believe that it is the highest sum calculated mentally.

"He seems to have a large memory and he's made this his life's ambition. It's quite remarkable to see it happen. A very small number of people have this extraordinary ability; nowadays there is only a handful."

Lemaire, who attends the University of Reims in northern France, began demonstrating his prowess by finding the 13th root of a random 100-digit number but gave up trying to improve his performance when he calculated an answer in under four seconds in 2004.

Like an athlete, he trains his brain daily for the far harder task of finding the 13th root of 200-digit numbers.

The beauty of math.

Courtesy of the Woz mailing list.

         
1 x 8 + 1 = 9
12 x 8 + 2 = 98
123 x 8 + 3 = 987
1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876
12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765
123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654
1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543
12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432
123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321

1 x 9 + 2 = 11
12 x 9 + 3 = 111
123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
123456 x 9 + 7 = 1111111
1234567 x 9 + 8 = 11111111
12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
123456789 x 9 +10= 1111111111

9 x 9 + 7 = 88
98 x 9 + 6 = 888
987 x 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 x 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 x 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 x 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 x 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 x 9 + 0 = 888888888

Brilliant, isn't it?

And look at this symmetry:

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111=12345678987654321

What Music and String Theory Have in Common

Here's an excerpt from a fascinating article that's going to be in tomorrow's TIME.

When you first hear them, a Gregorian chant, a Debussy prelude and a John Coltrane improvisation might seem to have almost nothing in common--except that they all include chord progressions and something you could plausibly call a melody. But music theorists have long known that there's something else that ties these disparate musical forms together. The composers of these and virtually every other style of Western music over the past millennium tend to draw from a tiny fraction of the set of all possible chords. And their chord progressions tend to be efficient, changing as few notes, by as little as possible, from one chord to the next.

Exactly how one style relates to another, however, has remained a mystery--except over one brief stretch of musical history. That, says Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, "is why, no matter where you go to school, you learn almost exclusively about classical music from about 1700 to 1900. It's kind of ridiculous."

But Tymoczko may have changed all that. Borrowing some of the mathematics that string theorists invented to plumb the secrets of the physical universe, he has found a way to represent the universe of all possible musical chords in graphic form. "He's not the first to try," says Yale music theorist Richard Cohn. "But he's the first to come up with a compelling answer."

Tymoczko's answer, which led last summer to the first paper on music theory ever published in the journal Science, is that the cosmos of chords consists of weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot out to prove to students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side. Indeed, the simplest chords, which consist of just two notes, live on an actual Möbius strip. Three-note chords reside in spaces that look like prisms--except that opposing faces connect to each other. And more complex chords inhabit spaces that are as hard to visualize as the multidimensional universes of string theory.

But if you go to Tymoczko's website you can see exactly what he's getting at by looking at movies he has created to represent tunes by Chopin and, of all things, Deep Purple. In both cases, as the music progresses, one chord after another lights up in patterns that occupy a surprisingly small stretch of musical real estate. According to Tymoczko, most pieces of chord-based music tend to do the same, although they may live in a different part of the orbifold space. Indeed, any conceivable chord lies somewhere in that space, although most of them would sound screechingly harsh to human ears.

What is the Poincare Conjecture?

Good question. I had to look it up. Put simply -- if it can be put simply -- it is a problem involving 3D spheres and loops, and its answer is one of seven Millenium Prizes offered for $1 million a pop. Dr. Grigory Perilman solved it, but is refusing the Fields math prize.

Wikipedia has a more complete explanation on the conjecture.

Grigory Perilman refuses math honor for solving the Poincare conjecture.

Excerpt from the NYT article below. Although Perilman is refusing it -- he says he does not feel a part of the mathematics world and does not want to represent it -- the Fields Medal people say he will still be listed as an award winner.

The Fields Medal, often described as mathematics’ equivalent to the Nobel Prize, is given every four years, and several can be awarded at once. Besides Dr. Perelman, three professors of mathematics were awarded Fields Medals this year: Andrei Okounkov of Princeton; Terence Tao of UCLA; and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.

Dr. Perelman, 40, is known not only for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, among the most heralded unsolved math problems, but also because he has declined previous mathematical prizes and has turned down job offers from Princeton, Stanford and other universities. He has said he wants no part of $1 million that the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass. has offered for the first published proof of the conjecture.

In June, Dr. Ball traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, where Dr. Perelman lives, for two days in hopes of persuading him to go to Madrid and accept the medal.

“He was very polite and cordial, and open and direct,” Dr. Ball said in an interview.

And if you have no clue what a Fibonacci code is?

Click here for a lucid description.

Judge puts a Fibonacci code in his ruling on the DaVinci code.

From Reuters, excerpted below. Now this is the guy we need on the Supreme Court.

LONDON (Reuters) - Mystery solved. It was the admiral.

A secret code embedded in the text of a court ruling in the case of Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" has been cracked, but far from revealing an ancient conspiracy it is simply an obscure reference to a Royal Navy admiral.

British High Court Justice Peter Smith, who handed down a ruling that Brown had not plagiarized his book, had embedded his own secret message in his judgment by italicizing letters scattered throughout the 71-page document.

In Brown's book, a secret code reveals an ancient conspiracy to hide facts about Jesus Christ.

The judge's own code briefly caused a wave of amused speculation when it was discovered by a lawyer this week, nearly a month after the ruling was handed down.

But the lawyer, Dan Tench, cracked it after a day of puzzling. The judge's code was based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical progression discussed in the book.

"After much trial and error, we found a formula which fitted," wrote Tench, who had nothing to do with the Brown case but discovered the italicized letters when studying the ruling.

The judge's secret message was: "Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought," Tench wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

Says David Letterman (about statistics).

"USA Today has come out with a new survey. Apparently, three out of every four people make up 75 percent of the population." David Letterman.

Fortune cookie lottery number pick -- a fraud?

Statistics suggest that the fortune cookie lottery number pick (U.S. Powerball) was a fraud. Reuters story below:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The cookie crumbled right for 110 people who chose Chinese food.

Betting on the numbers recommended in fortune cookies, they won from $100,000 to half a million dollars each in a multi-state U.S. Powerball lottery, organization director Charles Strutt said on Wednesday.

By the laws of statistical probability, there should have been only four or five winners among the 10.4 million ticket buyers in the lottery operated by the governments of 27 U.S. States, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But there were nearly 20 times that many, meaning $19 million had to be paid to unexpected winners in the March 30 drawing.

"Something was wrong; it was out of the realm of possibility," Strutt told Reuters. "So we suspected a great system error or a fraud. In the lottery business, you have to be naturally suspicious: whenever we see a statistical aberration we check it out."

Another possibility was a recommended lucky number in the media. So bewildered staff at Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball from Uniondale, Iowa, spent the next day scanning magazines recommending lucky numbers.

They even replayed and replayed an ABC television show "Lost" and an episode of soap opera "The Young and the Restless" in which Powerball numbers were discussed. No match.

When winners of the prize came forward to claim the prize on April Fool's Day, state lottery officials had instructions to grill the winners, Strutt said.

The first hint came from Tennessee, where the first three winners told lottery officials they took the numbers from fortune cookies. The story was repeated across America.

Tennessee and Idaho officials visited dozens of Chinese restaurants and traced the cookies back to a distributor in the New York area. The New York Times investigated the story, tracking the cookies to New York's Wonton Food, which calls itself the world's biggest fortune cookie maker.

And in fact, the cookie didn't crumble that finely.

The fortune cookie featured six lucky numbers. The first five were good enough for six-figure prizes, The sixth figure, needed for the jackpot of $25.5 million, was listed as 40, when the winning number was 42. A Tennessee man who shunned fortune cookie luck landed the biggest prize, Strutt said. 

Poincare conjecture may be solved.

This is big math news! Excerpt from today's SF Gate story below:

Publicity-shy Russian may have solved great math mystery

A publicity-shy Russian researcher who labors in near-seclusion may have solved one of mathematics' oldest and most abstruse problems, the Poincare Conjecture.

Evidence has been mounting since November 2002 that Grigori "Grisha" Perelman has cracked the 100-year-old problem, which seeks to explain the geometry of three-dimensional space.

If Perelman succeeded, he could be eligible for a $1 million prize offered by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Clay Mathematics Institute, formed to identify the world's seven toughest math problems.

Mathematicians around the world have been checking Perelman's work in search of the kind of flaws that have sunk the many other supposed solutions to a problem first presented by the French mathematician Henri Poincare in 1904.

"This is arguably the most famous unsolved problem in math and has been for some time," said Bruce Kleiner, a University of Michigan math professor reviewing Perelman's work.

Perelman's work has advanced the furthest without falling apart, and there is optimism that it will ultimately hold up.

"I don't think there's been a single example of a proof that has gotten this much attention and has withstood the scrutiny as it has so far," Kleiner said.

Not since Princeton University researcher Andrew Wiles cracked the 350-year-old Fermat's Last Theorem a decade ago has the math world been so consumed with one problem.