Mathematics

Rachel Crowell highlights the 2018 gala of the National Museum of Mathematics. The fundraiser featured a keynote speech from MIT graduate student and former NFL player John Urschel.

Prof. Angelika Amon is a recipient of this year’s Breakthrough Prize “for her work on aneuploidy, irregularities in the number of chromosomes,” which could lead to a new understanding of cancer, writes Martin Finucane for The Boston Globe. Prof. Chenyang Xu, Prof. Matt Evans and research scientist Lisa Barsotti received New Horizons Prizes in physics, while Prof. Daniel Harlow received one in math.  

TechRepublic reporter Nick Heath writes about Julia 1.0, a programming language created by MIT researchers. “The breadth of Julia's capabilities and ability to spread workloads across hundreds of thousands of processing cores have led to its use for everything from machine learning to large-scale supercomputer simulation,” writes Heath.

CNN reporter Don Lincoln writes that MIT researchers have discovered that it is possible to break a strand of dry spaghetti in two. Lincoln explains that the findings have applications "beyond making dinner. The calculations apply more generally to determining the crack formation of other rod-like structures, like poles used in pole vaulting and other engineering situations.”

Graduate student Vishal Patil speaks with NPR’s Rebecca Hersher about his work determining how to snap dry spaghetti in two. Patil found that, “when you twist it, you don't have to bend it as much before it breaks. When there's less bending in it, the snap-back — as the spaghetti tries to become a straight rod again — is weakened, so that no more fractures can occur.”

Using mathematical modeling, a mechanical fracture device and a camera, MIT researchers found that dry spaghetti can be split into two pieces, reports Allyson Chiu for The Washington Post. The findings could be applied to studying fracturing, explains graduate student Vishal Patil, who notes that, “there’s still a lot to be discovered about fracture control, and this is an example of fracture control.”

TODAY reporter Alessandra Bulow speaks with Prof. Jörn Dunkel about how he and his colleagues figured out how to snap a strand of spaghetti without it shattering into many pieces. Bulow notes that the noodles must be bent and twisted at the same time, and “you have to twist really strongly,” explains Dunkel.

UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that MIT researchers have successfully snapped a strand of spaghetti into only two pieces, solving an age-old mystery about why dry spaghetti noodles typically break into many pieces. “Scientists believe the discovery could help material scientists control for the fracturing patterns in other materials,” explains Hays.

A study by MIT researchers shows that by twisting and bending dry spaghetti past a certain angle, the noodles can be successfully split into two pieces, reports Travis Anderson for The Boston Globe. Anderson explains that the breakthrough, “could have implications far beyond the kitchen,” and could shed light on crack formation and how to control fractures in rod-like materials.

New Scientist reporter Frank Swain writes that MIT researchers have snapped dry spaghetti into two pieces, shedding light on the “conditions under which similar materials, such as steel rods in buildings, fracture under stress.” Prof. Jörn Dunkel explains that the spaghetti challenge has perplexed scientists for years, as it’s “one of those intrinsically interesting things that goes on around us.”

Prof. John Bush speaks with Popular Science reporter Dyani Sabin about the physics behind bending a soccer ball like a World Cup player. “The physics is rather complicated honestly, but there are simple ways to explain it,” says Bush. “The reason it looks mysterious is because you can’t see what the surrounding fluid, in this case air, is doing.”

Graduate student John Urschel appears on the Scientific American podcast My Favorite Theorem, where he shares his love of a theorem for graph theory developed by Daniel Spielman. Urschel points out that Spielman is “one of the first people to give provable guarantees for algorithms that can solve a Laplacian system of equations in near linear time.”

Cindy Atoji Keene of The Boston Globe speaks with MIT alumnus Niman Kenkre, who has been a high-stakes professional poker player for 12 years. Crediting his mathematic skills and sense of human psychology for his success, Kenkre says, “a player who relies only on mathematics will miss many important psychological cues relating to player frequencies and tendencies.”

MIT graduate student John Urschel describes the appeal of chess to HuffPost's Zach Young. "You might think someone who spends his days studying Laplacian eigenvectors would pick a hobby that’s a little more restful on the brain," writes Young. "But for Urschel, the appeal of math and the appeal of chess are very similar."

Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Fox writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining whether math games can be beneficial in helping children learn. The researchers found that, “children who played math games consistently showed a better grasp of the concepts…but that understanding did not appear to help in elementary school.”