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Your June 2013
ShillerLearning Tidbit
Can math stop terrorism?
Strategies borne from graph theory may work
Disrupt terror networks and you reduce or prevent terrorism. Recent work published in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics suggests strategies for making such disruption much easier.
Terror networks closely resemble hierarchical social networks, which describe many types of information flow, including that of corporations and, surprisingly, celebrities, that do not require reciprocity (for example, celebrities don't reciprocate and follow you just because you follow them).
Disrupt the right points in the network, and communication is interrupted or severely disrupted.
A cool math thing called a directed acyclic graph does a great job of modeling such networks, and provides a way for anti-terrorists to identify where those points are.
Yet another example of mathematicians saving the world!
They (celebrities) said it
The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong. Andy Rooney
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves. Marshall McLuhan
I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper. Brian Eno
June 2013 Puzzler [Grades 9-12]
The family car breaks down. A visitor at your house happens to have some tools and in a few minutes, voila! The car is fixed. If these are the only two choices, which is more likely: a) your visitor is a math tutor, or b) your visitor is a math tutor and a car mechanic?
Provide the correct answer by June 25, 2013 to be this month's puzzler winner.
Answer to previous Puzzler [Grades 4-8]
Say you divide a circle into many equal parts by drawing line segments from the center to points on the circle. If no two line segments form a diameter, what can you say about the number of parts?
Solution: If no two line segments form a diameter, then the circle must be divided into an odd number of parts.
I hope you enjoyed this short math break.
Sincerely,
Larry Shiller
Publisher
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