Science News

From Jos Leys, Étienne Ghys and Aurélien Alvarez, the makers of Dimensions, comes CHAOS, a math movie with nine 13-minute chapters. It is a film about dynamical systems, the butterfly effect and chaos theory, intended for a wide audience. CHAOS is available in a large choice of languages and subtitles.

The next time you recoil in fear as a 3-D tiger swipes at our hero, take a moment to consider the exquisite nonlinear elasticity behind the cat's lifelike movements.

Laura Overdeck is the founder of Bedtime Math, a nonprofit that hopes to put math on equal footing with the beloved bedtime story. By positioning math as a fun, recreational activity, Bedtime Math hopes to raise a new generation that never feels math anxiety. In her TEDx talk, Overdeck explores math anxiety among women and girls, and shows how the American culture conspires to convince young women that they are incapable of math, through stereotypes held by parents, teachers, retailers, and other women. It's so pervasive that women who are asked their gender at the start of a math quiz score *worse* than women who weren't reminded that they are female. Overdeck, who majored in astrophysics in college, then describes how these forces can be overcome through culture change, with a call to action for all of us to embrace math and be positive role models for all kids in the next generation, and particularly for the girls.

From machine learning to data mining. From statistics to probability. A lot of it seems similar, so what are the differences? Statistician William Briggs explains in an FAQ.

Modelling the spread of disease is a difficult business. Once upon a time diseases could spread only as fast as we could walk or ride a horse. But today our complicated travel patterns mean an epidemic can jump from country to country in a matter of hours when an infected person boards a plane. Epidemiologists use incredibly complex models involving huge amounts of transport, social contact and disease data to predict the spread of diseases. But Dirk Brockmann, a physicist from Northwestern University, thinks we can hide all this complexity and draw a simpler picture of how diseases spread, even in today's complex world.

If designers understood more about the mathematics of attraction, the mechanics of affection, all design could both look good and be good for you.

Michio Kaku says that God could be a mathematician: "The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.

It's not how smart you are but how hard you try that determines how well you do on a math test.

By now, everyone's heard of Moneyball. Applying statistics to baseball to build the best team for the buck. Naturally, there's a lot of interest these days in applying the same data-based philosophy to other sports. Jennifer Fewell and Dieter Armbruster used network analysis to model gameplay in basketball.

Marriage counseling is so 20th century. The 21st century may belong to relationship neuroinformaticians because they can create a mathematical model for efficient communication in your love life. The dynamics of love can look like a...

What is nine plus six, plus eight? You may not realise it, but you already know the answer. It seems that we unconsciously perform more complicated feats of reasoning than previously thought – including reading and basic mathematics.