Category: general mathematics

New Music Software Predicts The Hits

NPR’s Morning Edition takes a look at Hit Song Science, a new software program that purports to predict whether a pop song will be a hit or not–and seems to do a fairly good job of it. A study by the Harvard Business School found that the algorithms worked 8 out of 10 times. A sample quote from the Morning Edition broadcast:

Many of us like to believe that there’s a little magic behind the making of a hit single. Take a song like “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas. That’s a good song, judging by sales: It’s on top of the Billboard pop chart. David Meredith, CEO of Music Intelligence Solutions, says there’s no magic in that; it’s math. His software, called Hit Song Science, gave the song a hit score of 8.9 out 10.

The transcript of the piece is here; the page also contains a link to the audio of the piece itself.

2009 MacArthur Fellows Announced

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation annually hands out no-strings-attached “genius grants” of $500,000 each to 24 individuals. As always, this year’s awards are being reported everywhere (AP, UPI, NY Times, USA Today, etc.). The Foundation’s own list of the recipients is here.

Of relevance to this blog, 4 of the 24 recipients are explicitly cited for work that involves mathematics and/or mathematical analysis of data:

  • Esther Duflo, economist.
  • Peter Huybers, climate scientist.
  • L. Mahadevan, applied mathematician.
  • Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist.

It’s likely that a few of the other 24 recipients also use mathematics in their work (Maneesh Agrawala, computer vision technologist; John A. Rogers, applied physicist; and Theodore Zolli, bridge engineer, come to mind), but it’s not explicitly mentioned in any of their brief bios.

Shortly after the winners were announced, NPR interviewed Mahadevan about his work and the award.

Medieval Mosques Illuminated by Math

This segment from National Public Radio examines the intricate geometric designs that often cover historic buildings in the Islamic world. When Peter Lu, a graduate student at Harvard University, first saw one of them he was reminded of ‘quasicrystal’ patterns he’d encountered in his classes. While it’s doubtful that the creators of the ancient designs knew anything about quasicrystals, it’s equally surprising that their designs–created over 500 years ago–echo these structures that were only identified fairly recently.

For a nice picture of a quasicrystal in another context, also see What Is This? A Psychedelic Place Mat? from Discover magazine here.

Untangling the Mystery of the Inca

The ancient Andean empire built great cities but left no written records – except perhaps in mysterious knotted strings called khipu. Can an anthropologist and some mathematicians crack the code?

That’s the lead-in to this Wired magazine article by Gareth Cook, which details how Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton has turned the pattern-detecting power of mathematics to help decipher khipu, ancient patterns of knots and string that appear to encode information, perhaps even stories or poems, of the Incan empire.

Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009

Wired magazine presents the best science visualization videos of 2009:

The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.

All of these videos are of course essentially illustrations of mathematical models, models that are so complex that just making the individual frames of the videos requires heavy-duty mathematics and heavy-duty computational power.

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs

This Jan 26, 2009 Wall Street Journal article lists the best (and worst) 20 jobs in America for the previous year, as determined by Les Krantz, the author of the annual “Jobs Rated Almanac.” Krantz evaluates jobs based on environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. The best job? Mathematician! Moreover, 7 out of the top 10 are math or computer science related.