Artificial intelligence (commonly referred to as A.I.) can be regarded as a subfield of computer science, or more broadly, as an independent body of knowledge having a large, recognizable component that can rightly be identified as a subfield of...
Not so long ago most mathematicians showed little interest, and some of them even a little contempt, for the history, and the historian, of mathematics. This race has not yet died out. True, history was good for an anecdote or two: the vegetarian...
For the past several decades Presidents have been noted for the wars they have fought. Lyndon Johnson was famous for the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. President Nixon was famous for ending the war in Vietnam and his war against crime and...
As part of one of our mathematics courses, we decoded the Missouri driver's license code, using Gallian 119921 as a guide. It was a lot of fun Prof. Gallian admits in the article that he does not know where Missouri got its weighting factors for the...
Models of population growth are frequently employed for educational purposes. In this article we propose some reasons why this is a sensible thing to do. We also provide some answers to the query who cares about population models, anyway? To begin, we...
Introduction In addition to the traditional choices of one problem each oriented toward continuous mathematics and discrete mathematics, the 2016 Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) will offer for the first time the choice of a problem featuring...
The fundamental common concept of all applied mathematics is a mathematical model. Before the twentieth century, most of mathematics, pure and applied, was concerned with the analysis of mathematical models of physical phenomena. Since the advent of...
Abstract Mathematics is often advertised as pure, applied, or computational. What are the differences, and how relevant is pure mathematics in a world that is increasingly digital? We will explore these themes and discover important tools that are at...
In 1849 a German forester , Martin Faustmann, published a model for the optimal harvesting of timber. This model was almost completely ignored for more than a century; however, recently it has been the focus of a good bit of attention from both the...
Applied mathematics in an industrial setting often involves the reformulation of problems stated in nonmathematical language, the writing of computer programs for the numerical solution of the mathematical problems, the ability to work as part of a...
Few would question whether mathematicians contribute to the study of the physical sciences. Physicists and engineers are frequently so highly skilled as mathematicians that it is difficult to judge where such fields as theoretical physics differ from...
This article describes a practical problem that arises when not all of the possible sizes for an industrial product can be stocked, and demands for unstocked sizes are met by using larger stocked sizes (subsequently cut). The study was suggested by...
For several years the Department of Biophysical Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo has given a course in which instruction in decision analysis. as applied to medical practice, is interspersed with instruction in biophysical,...
In the manner of a large rock dropped into a tranquil pool the intellectual stir created in the 1870's by Stanley Jevons in London, Carl Menger in Vienna, and Leon Walras in Lausanne, sent waves in all directions, some of which have not entirely...
The American constitutional experience began as a great experiment. The United States was the first nation to launch representative government. This form of government is now commonplace, but at that time. it was celebrated as the grand discovery of...
The proliferation of hand-held calculators gives new relevance and urgency to the plea of the late G.E. Forsythe that users of numerical methods be made aware of the pitfalls of floating point computation. Although roundoff errors may remain...
Improvement and optimization are consistent themes throughout science. Entropy increases, an object falls to earth to minimize its potential energy, light rays refract in a way that minimizes the time required to travel from a point in one medium t o a...
Courses in calculus have routinely covered applications not only for their own sake but also in response to the students' most frequent question: What's this stuff good for? In the past, most applications centered on physical or engineering problems....
To the typical scientist or mathematician, the computer is a marvelous device for calculating and sorting: it can crunch numbersn a t astonishing speeds, and find needle-like optimal solutions among haystacks of possible options. But in fact it can...