Story Archives of 'Mathematics'

In the event of a zombie infestation, what would you do? Quarantine the zombies, try to develop a cure, or load a shotgun and aim for the head? It’s a conundrum that mathematicians, of all people, are studying in earnest.

An alarming paper in the scientific journal Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress caught our attention. A team of mathematicians from Canada modeled the potential outbreak of zombies, which they say is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed.

Living on Earth’s Jeff Young was equally alarmed, so he called up one of the paper’s authors, Philip Munz, to discover what all the panic is about.

(Photo by Mark Lobo via Flickr/Creative Commons)

If using popular song lyrics as an index, we sounded pretty happy in the mid-1960s. Things got increasingly dark after that. If we use blogs as a measure, well-being is rising steadily, and has been since 2005. Other indicators of national happiness are State of the Union addresses, Facebook and Twitter.

Determining happiness and well-being is a growing field in mass psychology. In Europe, especially Denmark, governments have been researching such trends for years. Bhutan has made "gross national happiness" an official measure.

A team of statisticians at the University of Vermont propose that analyzing popular language could be a valuable tool in the growing field of determining national well-being. Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds recently wrote a paper on what they are calling a "hedonometer", a real time measure of happiness around the globe. Chris Danforth, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UVM, joins us to tell us what that means.

Times Online: Twittering your way to happiness

(Photo by YoGeek Mami via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Math: It’s the subject many of us love to hate, and it shows: currently our country ranks 28th out of 40 nations in math scores. The reason, says longtime scholar Jo Bowler? “It’s taught poorly”. We’ll look at how we can make math more inviting to the next generation of number crunchers.

Guest

• Jo Boaler, Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Sussex in England and author of What’s Math Got to Do with It: Helping Children Learn to Love their Least Favorite Subject – and Why it’s Important for America

This program was originally broadcast September 8, 2008

It’s the subject many of us love to hate, and it shows: currently our country ranks 28th out of 40 nations in math scores. The reason, says longtime scholar Jo Bowler “it’s taught poorly”. We’ll look at how we can make math more inviting to the next generation of number crunchers.

Guest

• Jo Boaler, Marie Curie Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Sussex in England and author of What’s Math Got to Do with It: Helping Children Learn to Love their Least Favorite Subject – and Why it’s Important for America

Dan Rockmore has math on the brain, a lot. He's the author of ?Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis, the Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers" and is determined to make mathematics more accessible and interesting to people who fear the numbers. Dan is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dartmouth.