If you view Facebook as a plague on social dynamics, you might not be far wrong. Researchers from Princeton University claim that the social network’s popularity has spread like an infectious disease—but, as we slowly become immune to its charms, it will die out.
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Mathematicians aren’t renowned for their social skills. But in a quest to find love, Chris McKinlay from UCLA realised he could use his analytical skills to his advantage—by hacking OkCupid.
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Some people gobble up algebra and calculus like their life depended on it; others would rather poke pins into their eyes than solve a simultaneous equation. But why is that?
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Here’s a fun little brain wrinkle pinch for all you non-math people out there (that should be everyone in the world*): the sum of all natural numbers, from one to infinity, is not a ridiculously big number like you would expect but actually just -1/12. Yes, the sum of every number from one to infinity is some weird negative fraction. What the heck?
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When we last saw metamaterials, they were helping us create real-life invisibility cloaks
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If Jurassic Park taught us anything, it’s that humans are easy prey for T-Rex. But just how many human beings would such a dino need to chow down on every day just to survive?
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Martin Krzywinski is an artist. No, wait, he’s a mathematician. Actually, scratch that: he’s both, and he can make the number Pi look insanely beautiful.
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Born around 276 B.C. in Cyrene, Libya, Eratosthenes soon became one of the most famous mathematicians of his time. He is best known for making the first recorded measurement of the Earth’s circumference, which was also remarkably accurate. (And, yes, people at that point had known for some time that the world wasn’t flat, contrary to popular belief.)
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Birthdays are great, aren’t they? Really, we should have more of them—so why not try and do that by opting to celebrate mathematically significant dates rather than being a slave to the annual event?
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There have been no end of time and calendar mess-ups in software over the years, and they still seem to keep happening. So why is it that times and timezones still confuse the hell out of developers?
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
