Attention deficit in kids

A study says Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder among children is increasing .Symptoms of ADHD include restless feeling, often fidgeting with hands or feet, running, climbing, or leaving a seat, blurting out answers before hearing the whole question, and having difficulty waiting in line .ADHD can cause significant interference in a child's academics and interpersonal relations.A of factors that may contribute to ADHD including genetics, diet and social and physical environments.The survey was conducted in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Lucknow. It covered around 1,000 school teachers, who said that they have 1-3 children who are diagnosed with ADHD in every single class.

Mathematics Teaching

For the countless kids who sit through math class and wonder about the usefulness of algebra, geometry or calculus.Historically most "appealing" jobs haven't required mathematics ; rather, at most, only an ability to use calculators (old) and computers, internet (new). As a result, most kids see math as a giant bag of forgettable information used only to challenge them academically.In the wake of the Japanese earthquake or with all the recent flooding in parts of Canada, having effective evacuation plans are prepared by modelling..mathematical modelling is nothing new. The ancient Egyptians used geometry to model the world as they knew it and to predict when the Nile River would flood. At the height of the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak in 2009, researchers from Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital used air traffic pattern data to accurately predict how the virus would spread around the world.it's important that the mathematics community showcase the role we are playing and use this to excite kids and the public on the power of mathematics.

John Torrence Tate

US mathematician John Torrence Tate, cited for “his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers,” received Norway’s Abel Prize, dubbed the Nobel Prize for mathematics.Norwegian King Harald handed over the prize, worth 6 million kroner (900,000 dollars), at a ceremony in Oslo.During his 60—year career, Dr. Tate has contributed to research ranging from “the mysteries of prime numbers to the ways in which we store, transmit and secure information in modern computers.Several mathematical concepts have been named after him, including the Tate module, Tate curve, Tate cycle, Hodge—Tate decompositions, Tate cohomology, Serre—Tate parameter and Lubin—Tate group.Dr. Tate, 85, received his PhD from Princeton University in 1950.His academic career included a position at Columbia University and a 36—year stint at Harvard University. In 1990, he took up a position as a mathematics professor at the University of Texas, from which he recently retired.The Abel Prize was first awarded in 2003.It had been created a year earlier to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Niels Henrik Abel. He is considered to be Norway’s greatest mathematician, even though he died at age 26.Last year, the prize was awarded to Russian—born Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov of France.

Math explains HIV immunity

A mathematical model has revealed part of the secret to why some people infected with HIV never get sick providing a new target in the attempt to harness that ability in a vaccine., Arup Chakraborty from MIT and his colleagues went after the question using mathematical models, which, according to Chakraborty, are well suited for investigating complex evolving systems like the immune system.Chakraborty and his colleagues used their model to predict that the HLA-B57 subtype can bind to fewer self-peptides than other subtypes. As a result, this subtype trains T cells against fewer self-peptides.The researchers tested their model against samples taken from HIV patients, and found that, in those that tended to progress in their disease, their HLAs were also able to bind to more self-peptides.

Charles K. Megibben

Charles K. Megibben, who played a major role in developing the mathematics department of Vanderbilt University into a major research center, has died. He was 73 . Megibben, an internationally acknowledged leader in the theory of abelian groups, a major field of algebra, died March 2 in Nashville while undergoing heart surgery. He was a professor of mathematics, emeritus.Megibben became a professor of mathematics, emeritus, in 2005. Megibben was a popular professor among students, known for writing and distributing lecture notes to his classes instead of using published textbooks and spending time with students in his office answering math questions.

child prodigy

A child prodigy is defined as someone under the age of 13 who is capable of excelling in at least one area of skill at a level that is considered to be an adult level in that field. There are child prodigies in all different skills areas including music, math, chess, the arts and even humanities. As long as the child shows demonstrable adult-level skill in one of these areas prior to that age 13 mark, he or she is considered a prodigy in that area. The most famous child prodigies include Mozart for music and Picasso for art.Until now, almost nothing was knownabout the neural basis of exceptional cognitive ability. In a pioneering study in this issue, Pesenti and colleagues have now used functional brain imaging to examine the calculating prodigy RüdigerGamm, and to compare his brain activity with that of normal control subjects asthey perform mental arithmetical calcu-lations. Gamm is remarkable in that he is able (for example) to calculate 9th powers and 5th roots with great accuracy, and he can find the quotient of 2 primes to 60 decimal places. The authors found that Gamm’s calculation processes recruited a system of brain areas implicated in episodic memory, including right medialfrontal .They suggest that experts develop a way of exploiting the unlimited storage capacity of long-term memory to maintain task-relevant information, such as the sequence of steps and intermediate results needed for complex calculation, whereas the restof us rely on the very limited span ofworking memory.A child prodigy is someone who at an early age masters one or more skills at an adult level.Some researchers believe that prodigious talent tends to arise as a result of the innate talent of the child, the energetic and emotional investment that the child ventures, and the personal characteristics of the individual. Others believe that the environment plays the dominant role, many times in obvious ways.

Harish Chandra

Harish Chandra was a renowned physicist and mathematician of India. His father Chandrakishore was a civil engineer. Harish Chandra spent his childhood at his maternal grandfather's home in Kanpur. At an early age he received education from a tutor. He studied at Christ Church High School till the age of fourteen, and passed his intermediate degree from Kanpur. He went to the University of Allahabad and studied theoretical physics, influenced by Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He passed graduation in 1941 and achieved master's degree in 1943. He was a postgraduate research fellow under the supervision of Homi Bhabha on problems in theoretical physics, at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore. He married Lalitha Kale and had two daughters. Harish Chandra grew up in the state of Uttar Pradesh. As a very bright student in his MSc Physics class at Allahabad University, he solved the theory of the vibration of themridangam on the spot as the only question in his Acoustics exam paper, with Prof C V Raman as the examiner and received 100 marks for it. Until then only Prof C V Ramanhad worked this out and had not published it. This convinced Dr K S Krishnan, the headof the department of physics at Allahabad University and Dr C V Raman, the Director ofthe Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore that a very brilliant scholar was found. They recommended Harish Chandra to Dr Homi Bhabha who had recently returned to India from England after his PhD with Paul Dirac on the theory of the spin 3/2 particle.Homi Bhabha soon realized the ability of his first student Harish Chandra, and after somestudy with himself, recommended him to Prof Paul Dirac at Cambridge University. Hewas asked to solve the unitary representations of the Lorentz group for a PhD thesis.Until then only Dr Eugene Wigner, the brother-in –law of Dr P.A.M. Dirac had solved the problem , as well as work by Gelfand, Naimark and Bargmann. Harish Chandra developed his own approach to representations of non compact groups like the Lorentzgroup and the associated Fourier or harmonic analysis. This impressed both Dirac andWigner that Harish Chandra took just around two years to develop on his own a newapproach in group theory and use it for the Lorentz group.When asked by Paul Dirac whether it is necessary that the problem he works on and thesolution he finds have to be associated to physics while the method of work is of Mathematics, Harish Chandra said that it is not necessary that physics be the source orend point of his work, but mathematics was essential. Then he was recommended to become a mathematician and he went to Princeton where he remained all his life. LikeHermann Weyl and Elie Cartan before him, Harish Chandra made fundamentalcontributions to group theory, particularly to Lie algebras. Several programs inMathematics such as the Langlands program have arisen as a result of Harish Chandra’swork. The Institute at Allahabad is named as the Harish Chandra research Institute in his memory.K S Krishnan was Harish Chandra's teacher at Allahabad University; he recommended his name to Dirac for research work at Cambridge for his Ph.D. degree. In 1945, Harish-Chandra studied for his doctorate degree at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, under Dirac's supervision. However, he was not quite satisfied with Dirac's lectures when he realized that Dirac was actually reading from his books. During his days in Cambridge, he started to loose interest in Physics and took more interest in mathematics and attended the lecture courses of Littlewood and Hall. While attending a lecture by Pauli, he pointed out an error in Pauli's work. Later Pauli and Harish Chandra became very close friends. In 1947, he received his doctorate degree for his thesis 'Infinite irreducible representations of the Lorentz group. In the thesis he gave "a complete classification of the irreducible unitary representations of SL(2,C)". Harish Chandra accompanied Dirac to Princeton from 1947 to 1948 and worked as his assistant. During his stay at United States, the leading mathematicians Weyl, Artin and Chevalley who were working there had great impact on him. He remained at Princeton for another year even after Dirac came back to Cambridge. At Harvard from 1949-50, he was influenced by Zariski.. Harish Chandra was a faculty at the Columbia University from 1950-63, this duration is considered to be the most productive period of his career where he worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups. During this period he worked in many institutions. From 1955-56 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, from 1957-58 as a Guggenheim Fellow in Paris. Harish Chandra formulated a fundamental theory of representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras. He even extended the concept of a characteristic representation of finite-dimensional of semisimple Lie groups to infinite-dimensional representations of a case and formulated a Weyl's character formula analogue. Some of his other contributions are: the specific determination of the Plancherel measure for semisimple groups, the evaluation of the representations of discrete series, based on the results of Eisenstein series and in the concept of automorphic forms, his "philosophy of cusp forms", including the real Lie groups, but also p-adic groups or groups over adele rings. While working at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963, he was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968. Harish Chandra received many eminent awards as:
AMS Cole Prize in Algebra (1954)
Speaker at International Congress (1954)
AMS Colloquium Lecturer (1969)
Fellow of the Royal Society (1973)
Ramanujan Medal from Indian National Science Academy.(1974)
Honorary degrees by Delhi University (1973) and Yale University (1981)
Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (United States) (1981) He was participating in a conference in Princeton when he died on Sunday 16th October1983, due to a heart attack.

Janusz R. Prajs

Janusz R. Prajs, associate professor in the mathematics and statistics department,recieved the President's Award for Research and Creative Activity on in the University Union Foothill Suite.Prajs is the 21st recipient of the award, winning it for his wide-ranging research and publication in the mathematical area known as topology.The President's Award for Research and Creative Activity was established in 1989 and is given every year to a member of the Sacramento State faculty whose extraordinary research and creative activity has made significant contributions to his or her discipline in the past five years.Nominees, who are selected for the award by a subcommittee of the Faculty Senate, must be within their first 10 years of service at Sac State.His lecture at the event, titled "The Nature of Mathematical Discovery," focused on introducing the study of pure mathematics in an informal and personal manner accessible to non-mathematicians and non-specialists.Accompanied by a slideshow of diagrams, the lecture was divided into two parts. The first half aimed at conveying a general understanding of what pure mathematics embodies, mathematical research processes and the problems associated with the field.Defining mathematics, Prajs said it is "the study of what our mind can produce and develops creatively."Prajs also said that the definition of research in mathematics is very different from research in other academic areas because results in mathematics are highly unpredictable.The second half of Prajs' lecture zeroed in on his specific research in topology and the discussion of a few of his research results on homogeneous spaces.According to the lecture program, topology is defined as a branch of mathematics that studies properties of a space preserved under continuous deformations and those that describe how a space is assembled. Prajs produced 45 major-referred publications in the field of topology. His research is known both nationally and internationally in the mathematical community. In 2008, Prajs held three speaking events at the Summer Topology Conference in Mexico City.He has also received a National Science Foundation research grant for a project known as "Homogeneous continua in 3-space."If you consider the responsibilities of teaching, alongside with research, it's pretty amazing that (he) could do something like that," said Chris Fioritto, graduate student in the mathematics department who was one of about 60 others to attend the lecture and the reception that followed.

Infosys Mathematics Prize

For his outstanding contribution to Mathematics, Professor Manindra Agarwal of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) has been chosen as the first recipient of the Infosys Mathematics Prize.The head of the computer science and engineering department at IIT-K, Agarwal has been selected for the award for his design of algorithms for testing of prime numbers. it is most useful for the online payment system.For online payment, the prime number is important. A slight error in judging the prime number can lead to the decoding of the credit card, Possibilities of hacking of credit cards increase if even numbers are used for online payment. Agarwal completed his BTech in computer sciences from IIT-K in 1986, and his PhD in 1991. Over the years, he has been working on Complexity Theory, a branch of mathematics,

Gerhard Ringel

Gerhard Ringel, a former UC Santa Cruz professor of mathematics, died on June 24 in his home. He was 88.Ringel was one of the world's foremost experts on combinatorics and graph theory. He is credited, along with J.W.T. Youngs, with solving the famous Heawood Conjecture. The conjecture gave the formula for the minimum number of colors necessary to color all graphs drawn on an orientable surface. minimum number of colors H(p) needed to color a map on a surface of genus p, namely
H(p) = [ 1/2( 7 + √( 48p + 1)) ].he had a love for butterflies and a massive 5,000 specimen collection.Ringel donated his world-class collection to the museum in 2006.Ringle came to Santa Cruz in 1967 to work at UCSC as a visiting professor. He returned in 1970, accepting an appointment as professor of mathematics. He spent the next 20 years teaching, achieving emeritus status in 1990.

Prof Du Sautoy

Prof Du Sautoy was born in 1965 and grew up in Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. He studied maths at Oxford University, where his outstanding ability was acknowledged when the young student was admitted to the institution’s exclusive All Souls College. He is now a Professor of Mathematics at Wadham College.He has popularised the subject through his television programme, Mind Games. The show first screened on BBC 4 in 2004.According to Prof du Sauto indicator of beauty is more than skin deep. Symmetry indicates that an individual has a good genetic heritage and is therefore a 'good' mate'.Du Sautoy strips the human desire for symmetry down to the most basic need to sustain life.

mathematical modelling

A new study has shown that maths and medicine could help cure patients suffering from CML or chronic myelogenous leukaemia with an optimally-timed cancer vaccine, where the timing is determined based on their own immune response.Researchers have described their success in creating a mathematical model which predicts that anti-leukaemia immune response in CML patients using the drug imatinib can actually be stimulated in a way to provide a cure for the disease.In their study,the researchers took into account the patient's natural immune response in conjunction with effects of imatinib, a drug that has been successful in putting CML patients into remission.They wanted to see if they can develop a mathematical model, or set of rules, that increases chances for long-term remission in individual patients.

John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash junior was born 80 years ago, on 13 June 1928, in the small town of Bluefield, West Virginia. His father worked as an electrical engineer and his mother was trained as a teacher. Nash attended high school, but took little part in normal schoolboy life. In 1945, he went to the technical college in Pittsburgh now known as Carnegie Mellon University. There he initially studied chemistry, but switched to mathematics and won a scholarship in 1948 to attend an elite east coast university Within two years after joining Princeton University mathematics department,Nash completed his dissertation (PDF) on game theory, in which he presented concept of a non-cooperative game and the optimal strategy subsequently named after him, the Nash equilibrium.One popular example of such a game is the "Battle of the Sexes". A man and a woman at different points in a city want to spend the evening together. Their mobile phones are out of order, so they can only set off with the guidance of common sense, hoping of course to find each other at the venue. They can choose either a football match, which the man prefers, or a concert, the woman's preference.while at Princeton the young mathematician also developed the Nash bargaining solution and invented the Nash embedding theorem.In 1957 he married Alicia Larde, a student from an upper middle-class family originating in El Salvador. In 1951 he began teaching at MIT in Boston, where among other things he solved Hilbert's 19th problem.Nash began to show signs of schizophrenia in 1958.After three decades, Nash succeeded in shaking off his illness. At the same time, the increasing popularity of game theory was drawing the attention of specialists to his writings.in 1994, together with John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten, John Nash won the Nobel prize for economics.

Roger Schank and Effective Teaching

Roger Schank, one of the world's leading researchers in artificial intelligence, learning theory and cognitive science, discussed his ideas on learning in a series of lectures.The current methods of teaching are ineffective because of several problems, one of which is the mindset of teachers as authority figures whom students need to impress, rather than as mentors who work closely with students to help them learn."Education is not about pleasing the teacher," Schank said.Another problem with the current education system is that lectures are not effective ways of teaching. Students should be asking the questions. Curriculum is often irrelevant to actual situations a person will face in his or her life.Instead of traditional methods, Schank recommends complete emersion into the learning environment. He referred to the analogy of cave men who did not sit in lectures or go to classrooms, but learned as they went along. They learned by telling stories,learning procedures and copying the actions of others, among other techniques.Schank has established the Virtual International Science and Technology Academy, which is founded upon these ideas.He suggests getting rid of the classroom setting and allowing students to experience real situations-putting them in situations where they are forced to find a solution, and where success is it own reward, rather than grades and scores.

Alladi Ramakrishnan

Alladi Ramakrishnan, who made fundamental contributions to several fields of study since 1947 and founded the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (MATSCIENCE), died in Gainesville, Florida, on Saturday night.Dr. Ramakrishnan was the Director of MATSCIENCE in Chennai for 22 years, during which he built up an ethos of innovative thinking and an ambience that was ever responsive to new ideas.Prof. Alladi Ramakrishnan is the son of that eminent lawyer, Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer, who together with B. R. Ambedkar, T. T. Krishnamachari, K. M. Munshi, N. Madhava Row and Benegal Narasingha Rao drafted the Indian Constitution.Dr. Ramakrishnan graduated in Physics from Madras University in 1943. He took his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1951 and later taught theoretical physics at the University of Madras until 1962 and became a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.He has authored or co-authored over 150 influential scientific papers in leading journals on topics ranging over Stochastic Processes, Elementary Particle Physics, Matrix Algebra, and the Special Theory of Relativity.On January 3, 1962 mathematical Institute was inaugurated by Prof. S. Chandrasekhar, F.R.S. Distinguished Service Professor of the Enrico Fermi Institute of Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, in the main English lecture hall of Presidency College. The first lecture was by Chandrasekhar himself: he had agreed to be an Honorary Professor of Astrophysics at the Madras institute. He addressed its first students in the Physics lecture room where his illustrious uncle, Sir C. V. Raman, Ramakrishnan and C. Subramaniam had all spent many hours as undergraduates. It was Raman who had persuaded Ramakrishnan, the physics graduate who had become a lawyer, to return to physics and mathematics.Dr. Ramakrishnan passionately believed that science and art could go hand-in-hand. He was one who could appreciate the mathematical structures in Carnatic music as much as he could revel in the purity of the mathematical form.

boys not better than girls in mathematics

According to new research published in the journal Science, the "gender gap" in maths, long perceived to exist between girls and boys, disappears in societies that treat both sexes equally. When girls have equal access to education and other opportunities they do just as well as boys in maths tests.The research, led by Prof Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University in the US, investigated whether a global gender gap exists and whether it was the result of social engineering rather than intrinsic aptitude for the subject.research team came to the conclusion after looking at results of a standardised international exam taken by over 270,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries in 2003.It was discovered that this was most likely to occur in the most gender equal societies such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway.

math reform

The government has introduced mathematics laboratories in schools to improve conceptual understanding and overcome exam-related stress.According to information available, over 5,857 students committed suicide across India in 2006 due to examination related stress.The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), 2005 recommends measures like reduction of curriculum load, emphasis on comprehension and application of knowledge and focus on continuous and comprehensive evaluation.The emphasis is on testing of competency and making examination more flexible, besides counselling in schools, and over all to make learning child-centric.

India’s math contribution

Indians' contribution to the development of mathematics has largely been swept under the carpet in global history books. But a BBC crew, led by an Oxford professor, was in the country last week to film a documentary revealing Indians created some of the most fundamental mathematical theories.The Story of Maths, a four-part series, will be screened on BBC Four in 2008. The first part looks at the development of maths in ancient Greece, ancient Egypt and Babylon; the second focuses on India, China and Central Asia and the rest look at how maths developed in the West. The India reel focuses on how several Indians developed theories in maths that were later discovered by Westerners who took credit for them.Aryabhatta (476–550 AD), who calculated pi, and Brahmagupta (598-670 AD) feature in the film, which also showcases a Gwalior temple, which documents the first inscription of ‘zero’.The documentary also features the history of Kerala-born mathematician Madhava (1350-1425) who created calculus 300 years before Newton and German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz did, said Du Sautoy. “We learn that Newton invented the mathematical theory calculus in the 17th century but Madhava created it earlier,” Du Sautoy said.Chennai-born Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) also features in the film. “He developed a lot of his own maths. He contacted English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who persuaded him to come to Cambridge. They began a collaboration between the analytical maths of the West and the intuitive maths of India, and together produced brilliant theories and amazing results.”

math education

The Senate voted to authorize an additional $16 billion for math and science p rograms over the next four years to keep the nation in the forefront of technology breakthroughs.The increase would boost total spending in these programs to $60 billion over the four-year period.The authorized spending would double total funding for the National Science Foundation in five years and set the Energy Department's Office of Science on a path to double over 10 years.An Innovation Acceleration Research Program would encourage federal agencies to set aside 8 percent of research and development spending for high-risk research.The bill would create science magnet schools, with each of the Energy Department's national laboratories adopting a school to strengthen its math and science programs.There would be funds to train teachers in math and science education and encourage student participation in advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs.Senate passage came a day after the House approved legislation intended to boost the number of highly qualified math and science teachers in U.S. schools.The bill would authorize more than $600 million through 2012 for scholarships and stipends for college students studying math and science in preparation for teaching careers.They could receive annual scholarships of $10,000 if they commit to teaching elementary or secondary pupils upon graduation.

math in uk

A poor grasp of maths among British science undergraduates is threatening the country's future prosperity, says a report.Comparing tests in this country with China, it says that while many university students in England struggle to answer basic questions, China demands a high level of mathematical competence of anyone seeking to enter higher education.First-year science students in England being assessed for their maths ability are given questions expected of 14-year-olds in the national curriculum tests, such as calculating the area of a triangle and using the Pythagoras theorem to find sides in a right-angled triangle.Meanwhile, students in their last year of school in China sit a tough university entrance test which requires them to determine a series of angles in a square prism.The report by the Royal Society of Chemistry warns that an increasing number of science undergraduates have dropped maths at 16 and have to sign up for remedial courses when they arrive at university.