It is highly unlikely that the Electoral College will be abolished anytime soon. A constitutional amendment requires ratification by three-fourths of all states, over half of which have single-digit numbers of electoral votes. Given that most people believe the Electoral College favors small states, these small states will… Continue reading »
Recently, we saw in the headlines that a new world record has been set for the largest prime (not surprisingly, it’s a Mersenne prime, which means it’s of the form for some n); see here, or for more details, see here. Also, StewJo started a blog… Continue reading »
Math/Stats Spring Teaching Assistant applications are due by Friday, October 30, 2015. See Marissa, Bronfman 200 for an application or email her at Marissa.M.Barschdorf@williams.edu. Continue reading »
Math departments are full of smart people. But with the demands (and joys) of research and teaching (and of our personal lives), most people in math departments do not talk to each other about math nearly enough. Certainly that is true at Williams. We do have a fairly… Continue reading »
Nice senior colloquium presentation today (9/22/08) by Richard McDowell ’09 on Benford’s Law. This law explains why, when looking at numbers that come to us from newspapers, stock quotes, and various data sources, the digit 1 appears most often as the leading digit. Benford’s Law derives from… Continue reading »
Fermat’s Last Theorem says that for positive integers n > 2, x, y, z, there are no solutions to . On the first day of my senior seminar on “The Big Questions,” the class asked me whether it remains true for rational exponents. Andrew Granville told me that… Continue reading »
The 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics went to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their revolutionary Black-Scholes differential equation for the value of financial instruments—termed a stochastic differential equation because it includes a random element. The work contained some deep but relatively simple… Continue reading »
A great strength of the Mathematics and Statistics department here at Williams is the removal of classical boundaries. The two towers of research and teaching are not separated into distinct domains but integrated in one structure. Our conversations in the hallways, during our lunch… Continue reading »