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Articles by Brian Hayes
How Community Health Providers Can Help Patients Connect to Veterans Affairs Resources
By Mary H. Parker, James M. Galkowski, Brian P. Hayes Parker, Mary H., James M. Galkowski, and Brian P. Hayes. 2015. "How Community Health Providers Can Help Patients Connect to Veterans Affairs Resources." North Carolina Medical Journal 76 (5): 328-31. https://doi.org/10.18043/ncm.76.5.328.
Third Base
November-December 2001 Volume 89, Number 6 This column was published in the November–December 2001 issue of American Scientist. For an illustrated version, please download an alternative format. People count by tens and machines count by twos—that pretty much sums up the way we do arithmetic on this planet. But there are countless other ways to count. Here I want to offer three cheers for base 3, the ternary system.
Index to Mathematical Games
This is an index of Martin Gardner's 297 monthly columns in Scientific American from 1957 thru 1981. Martin also wrote four (4) regular articles for SciAm, indexed here by author 'MGA', the first in 1952 and the last in 1998! After Martin 'retired' to focus on writing more books, the column was carried on for two more decades by various others, whose columns are also indexed here. This index was compiled by me, John Miller of Portland, Oregon.
Syndication: Statesman Journal
Washington State quarterback Cameron Ward (1) scrambles from Oregon State linebacker Omar Speights (1) during the fourth quarter at Reser Stadium at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022. Ncaa Football Washington State At Oregon State 2007
Gauss's Day of Reckoning
This Article From Issue May-June 2006 Volume 94, Number 3 Let me tell you a story, although it's such a well-worn nugget of mathematical lore that you've probably heard it already: The paragraph above is my own rendition of this anecdote, written a few months ago for another project. I say it's my own, and yet I make no claim of originality. The same tale has been told in much the same way by hundreds of others before me.
Chalkophilia
DO NOT ERASE: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards. Jessica Wynne. With an afterword by Alec Wilkinson. 227 pp. Princeton University Press, 2021. $35. Chalk is the fossil fuel of modern mathematics. It was formed in the Cretaceous period, roughly 100 million years ago, when the seas swarmed with foraminifera and other planktonic organisms whose calcium-rich skeletons accumulated in thick beds of the soft, white stone.
The Science of Sticky Spheres
This Article From Issue November-December 2012 Volume 100, Number 6 Take a dozen marbles, all the same size, and squeeze them into a compact, three-dimensional cluster. Now count the number of points where the marbles touch one another. What is the maximum number of contact points you can possibly achieve with 12 marbles? What geometric arrangement yields this greatest contact number? Is the optimal cluster unique, or are there multiple solutions that all give the same maximum?
Group Theory in the Bedroom
This Article From Issue September-October 2005 Volume 93, Number 5 Having run out of sheep the other night, I found myself counting the ways to flip a mattress. Earlier that day I had flipped the very mattress on which I was not sleeping, and the chore had left a residue of puzzled discontent.
An Adventure in the Nth Dimension
This Article From Issue November-December 2011 Volume 99, Number 6 The area enclosed by a circle is πr2. The volume inside a sphere is 4/3πr3. These are formulas I learned too early in life. Having committed them to memory as a schoolboy, I ceased to ask questions about their origin or meaning.
Making Sense of the Brain
THE IDEA OF THE BRAIN: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. Matthew Cobb. 470 pp. Basic Books, 2020. $32. A symphony, a sonnet, a theorem, a joke: These are all products of human thought and imagination. Where do thought and imagination come from? They abide in the brain, which provides the material substrate for all our ideas and feelings.
Mathematical Mosaics
OPT ART: From Mathematical Optimization to Visual Design. Robert Bosch. 188 pp. Princeton University Press, 2019. $29.95. Held at arm’s length, the illustration below is easily recognized as a portrait of the 44th president of the United States. Closer examination reveals that the image is formed from blocks of white dots set against a black background.
Wichita farmers market deemed ‘essential business,’ opens Saturday with extra precautions
The Kansas Grown Farmers Market opens this weekend but organizers say they are taking extra safety precautions amid coronavirus fears. Brian Hayes Brian Hayes Farmers market season has arrived in Wichita, and one of the city’s two popular annual markets is set to open on Saturday.
The Higher Arithmetic
This Article From Issue September-October 2009 Volume 97, Number 5 Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars.
2019's Most Popular Articles
In compiling a top-10 list of this year’s most popular magazine articles on American Scientist's website, we decided to look at what you—our readers—have been searching for the most. So here they are! Media hype has missed the biggest concern that ecologists and entomologists have about six-legged life: how little we know about it. (May–June, 2019) Research on the fauna living in aquifers is urgently needed as they become endangered by groundwater overdraft.
Flights of Fancy
This Article From Issue January-February 2011 Volume 99, Number 1 A thousand starlings rose in unison from trees along a riverbank. The ascending cloud of birds took the form of a teardrop, then transformed itself into a butterfly, then a twisting vortex narrowing to a sinuous, quivering rope of birds stretched across the twilight sky. The flock had all the synchronized precision of a marching band, but none of the rigid, rank-and-file geometry.
How to Count
Counting is something we learn so early in life that we tend to dismiss it as a trivial skill, beneath the notice of mathematics. The recent U.S. presidential election suggests otherwise. Although most of the vote-counting controversies last fall concerned what to count rather than how to count, the counting process itself also proved to be imprecise and unreliable. Counting and recounting the same batch of ballots seldom gave the same total twice.
Math with Attitude
MATH WITH BAD DRAWINGS: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality. Ben Orlin. 367 pp. Black Dog and Leventhal, 2018. $27.99. Math books meant for a broad audience are often tinged with evangelical fervor. They yearn to reinspire all those millions who lost their faith in numbers somewhere between flash-card drills and the quadratic formula. Real mathematics isn’t like that, the books assure us.
Foolproof
This Article From Issue January-February 2007 Volume 95, Number 1 I was a teenage angle trisector. In my first full-time job, fresh out of high school, I trisected angles all day long for $1.75 an hour. My employer was a maker of volt-meters, ammeters and other electrical instruments. This was back in the analog age, when a meter had a slender pointer swinging in an arc across a scale. My job was drawing the scale.
How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?
What's most remarkable about the question posed in my title is that I probably don't need to explain it. If you have checked your e-mail anytime in the past few years, you know all about "V.i.a.g.r.a" and "V!A6RA" and "\/lagra," not to mention "C1aL|$" and "Rrol,x Rep,ica" and—let's not be bashful about this—"pen1s en1argement." As spam has been proliferating in everyone's inbox, it has also been mutating madly, presumably in an effort to evade the filters that most of us now have in place.
Programming Your Quantum Computer
This Article From Issue January-February 2014 Volume 102, Number 1 The year is 2024, and I have just brought home my first quantum computer. When I plug it in and switch it on, the machine comes to life with a soft, breathy whisper from the miniature cryogenic unit. A status screen tells me I have at my disposal 1,024 qubits, or quantum bits, offering far more potential for high-speed calculation than all the gigabits and terabytes of a conventional computer.
Moonshot Computing
Fifty years ago, three astronauts and two digital computers took off for the Moon. A few days later, half a billion earthlings watched murky television images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin clambering out of the Apollo 11 lunar module and leaving the first human bootprints in the powdery soil of the Sea of Tranquility. (Michael Collins, the command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit.) The astronauts became instant celebrities.
Crawling toward a Wiser Web
To put all human knowledge at everyone’s fingertips—that was the grandiose vision of Paul Otlet, a Belgian librarian and entrepreneur. Starting in the 1890s, he copied snippets of text onto index cards, which he classified, cross-referenced, and filed in hundreds of wooden drawers.
Belles lettres Meets Big Data
The literary scholar needs a quiet room, a reading lamp, a notebook, a receptive mind—and algorithms for n-gram analysis, part-of-speech tagging, word-sense disambiguation, and sentence parsing. “Digital humanities” is all the rage these days in English departments. Recent meetings of the Modern Language Association have had dozens of sessions on the theme.
Cultures of Code
This Article From Issue January-February 2015 Volume 103, Number 1 Kim studies parallel algorithms, designed for computers with thousands of processors. Chris builds computer simulations of fluids in motion, such as ocean currents. Dana creates software for visualizing geographic data. These three people have much in common. Computing is an essential part of their professional lives; they all spend time writing, testing, and debugging computer programs.
Everything Is Under Control
In 1949, faculty and students at the London School of Economics gathered to observe a demonstration. At the front of the room was a seven-foot-tall contraption assembled out of plastic pipes, tanks, valves and other plumbing hardware. The device, later dubbed the MONIAC, was a hydraulic analog computer for modeling the flow of money through a national economy. When the machine was powered up, colored water gurgled through the transparent tubes and sloshed into reservoirs.
The Paisley Leopard
NATURE’S PATTERNS: A Tapestry in Three Parts. Philip Ball. Oxford University Press, 2009. Shapes, x + 308 pp., $29.95; Flow, x + 190 pp., $29.95; Branches, x + 221 pp., $29.95.
Father of Fractals
This Article From Issue January-February 2013 Volume 101, Number 1 THE FRACTALIST: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick. Benoit B. Mandelbrot. xviii + 324 pp. Pantheon, 2012. $30. Thirty years ago, when I was new to writing about computation and mathematics, I received a note from Benoit Mandelbrot suggesting we have lunch. I was flattered that the celebrated author of The Fractal Geometry of Nature had noticed my work, and I looked forward to meeting him.
New Dilemmas for the Prisoner
This Article From Issue November-December 2013 Volume 101, Number 6 At the police station two suspects are questioned in separate rooms. Whoever talks first gets the better deal, the detective tells them. But they know that if they both keep quiet, they might beat the rap. Television scriptwriters have drawn on this situation for countless plots. Game theorists have seized on it, too, but theirs is a more abstract and austere art form.
The 100-Billion-Body Problem
Isaac Newton earned his fame by solving a two-body problem: He showed how gravitational attraction binds the Earth and the Sun into elliptical orbits. His formulas worked equally well for the Earth and the Moon or the Earth and an apple, but Newton was stumped when he tried to apply his law of universal gravitation to a three-body problem, such as the combined Sun-Earth-Moon system.
Uniquely Me!
Suppose you fill out a survey online, with the assurance that your answers will remain anonymous. The questionnaire doesn’t record your name and address, but it does ask for some demographic information: your date of birth, your zip code, and your gender. What are the chances you could be identified from those three facts alone? You can answer this question for yourself at the website http://aboutmyinfo.org, which was set up by Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University.
Delving into Deep Learning
The deep methods have a role in some well-known speech-recognition systems, such as Apple’s Siri and the Google search-by-voice service. They are also leading the way in aspects of computer vision. Apart from perceptual tasks, deep learning is proving adept at data mining: extracting meaningful patterns from large data sets. How do the deep programs work? Oddly enough, no one can answer this question in full detail.
Playing in Traffic
I was southbound on Interstate 95, approaching Washington, DC, on a summer afternoon. The Capital Beltway offers two routes around the city—an eastern loop via Greenbelt, MD, and a western arc through Tysons Corner, VA. As I approached the decision point, online traffic maps showed several slow spots on the western branch, whereas the eastern roadway was flowing freely.
Programs and Probability
This Article From Issue September-October 2015 Volume 103, Number 5 Randomness and probability are deeply rooted in modern habits of thought. We meet probabilities in the daily weather forecast and measures of uncertainty in opinion polls; statistical inference is central to all the sciences. Then there’s the ineluctable randomness of quantum physics. We live in the Age of Stochasticity, says David Mumford, a mathematician at Brown University.
Computer Vision and Computer Hallucinations
This Article From Issue November-December 2015 Volume 103, Number 6 People have an amazing knack for image recognition. We can riffle through a stack of pictures and almost instantly label each one: dog, birthday cake, bicycle, teapot. What we can’t do is explain how we perform this feat. When you see a rose, certain neurons in your brain’s visual cortex light up with activity; a tulip stimulates a different set of cells. What distinguishing features of the two flowers determine this response?
Over the Edge
DEEPWATER HORIZON: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster. Earl Boebert and James M. Blossom. 290 pp. Harvard University Press, 2016. $39.95. A book about a disaster necessarily belongs to the genre of tragedy. You read the story already knowing that it will end with loss and carnage. But in a technological disaster, unlike in a Greek play, the actors are not mere helpless playthings of the gods.
Automation on the Job
This Article From Issue January-February 2009 Volume 97, Number 1 Automation was a hot topic in the 1950s and ’60s—a subject for congressional hearings, blue-ribbon panels, newspaper editorials, think-tank studies, scholarly symposia, documentary films, World’s Fair exhibits, even comic strips and protest songs.
The Manifest Destiny of Artificial Intelligence
This Article From Issue July-August 2012 Volume 100, Number 4 Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet.
Over the Edge " American Scientist
DEEPWATER HORIZON: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster. Earl Boebert and James M. Blossom. 290 pp. Harvard University Press, 2016. $39.95. A book about a disaster necessarily belongs to the genre of tragedy. You read the story already knowing that it will end with loss and carnage. But in a technological disaster, unlike in a Greek play, the actors are not mere helpless playthings of the gods.
Uniquely Me! " American Scientist
How much information does it take to single out one person among billions? Suppose you fill out a survey online, with the assurance that your answers will remain anonymous. The questionnaire doesn’t record your name and address, but it does ask for some demographic information: your date of birth, your zip code, and your gender. What are the chances you could be identified from those three facts alone?
First Links in the Markov Chain
One hundred years ago the Russian mathematician A. A. Markov founded a new branch of probability theory by applying mathematics to poetry. Delving into the text of Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin , Markov spent hours sifting through patterns of vowels and consonants. On January 23, 1913, he summarized his findings in an address to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
Pencil, Paper, and Pi
This Article From Issue September-October 2014 Volume 102, Number 5 William Shanks was one of the finest computers of the Victorian era—when the term computer denoted not a machine but a person skilled in arithmetic. His specialty was mathematical constants, and his most ambitious project was a record-setting computation of pi.
Imitation of Life
This Article From Issue January-February 2013 Volume 101, Number 1 Almost 30 years ago, Harold J. Morowitz, who was then at Yale, set forth a bold plan for molecular biology. He outlined a campaign to study one of the smallest single-celled organisms, a bacterium of the genus Mycoplasma. The first step would be to decipher its complete genetic sequence, which in turn would reveal the amino acid sequences of all the proteins in the cell.
Clarity in Climate Modeling
This Article From Issue November-December 2014 Volume 102, Number 6 No computer simulations have ever had broader consequences for human life than the current generation of climate models. The models tell us that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can trigger abrupt shifts in the planet’s climate; to avert those changes or mitigate their effects, the entire human population is urged to make fundamental economic and technological adjustments.
Alice and Bob in Cipherspace
This Article From Issue September-October 2012 Volume 100, Number 5 Alice hands bob a locked suitcase and asks him to count the money inside. “Sure,” Bob says. “Give me the key.” Alice shakes her head; she has known Bob for many years, but she’s just not a trusting person. Bob lifts the suitcase to judge its weight, rocks it back and forth and listens as the contents shift inside; but all this reveals very little. “It can’t be done,” he says.
An Adventure in the Nth Dimension
On the mystery of a ball that fills a box, but vanishes in the vastness of higher dimensions The area enclosed by a circle is πr2. The volume inside a sphere is 4/3πr3. These are formulas I learned too early in life. Having committed them to memory as a schoolboy, I ceased to ask questions about their origin or meaning.
Machine Politics
Reapportionment and redistricting are vexing problems of meta-politics. They are "meta" issues because they concern the rules of the political process itself—the way the teams are chosen. In the American political system, a decision about reapportionment and redistricting helps determine who will make all other decisions for the next 10 years. It's no surprise, then, that disputes over these matters have often been rancorous.
Cultures of Code
Kim studies parallel algorithms, designed for computers with thousands of processors. Chris builds computer simulations of fluids in motion, such as ocean currents. Dana creates software for visualizing geographic data. These three people have much in common. Computing is an essential part of their professional lives; they all spend time writing, testing, and debugging computer programs. They probably rely on many of the same tools, such as software for editing program text.
Programming Your Quantum Computer
The hardware doesn’t yet exist, but languages for quantum coding are ready to go. The year is 2024, and I have just brought home my first quantum computer. When I plug it in and switch it on, the machine comes to life with a soft, breathy whisper from the miniature cryogenic unit. A status screen tells me I have at my disposal 1,024 qubits, or quantum bits, offering far more potential for high-speed calculation than all the gigabits and terabytes of a conventional computer.
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