Mathematical Moments from the American Mathematical Society
Mathematical Moments promote an appreciation and understanding of the role mathematics plays in science, nature, technology, and human culture. Hear experts talk about how they use mathematics in various applications from improving film animation to analyzing voting strategies.
- Update frequency
- every 24 days
- Average duration
- 6 minutes
- Episodes
- 141
- Years Active
- 2005 - 2024
Restoring Genius - Discovering lost works of Archimedes - Part 2
Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his w…
00:07:15 |
Thu 13 Nov 2008
Restoring Genius - Discovering lost works of Archimedes - Part 1
Archimedes was one of the most brilliant people ever, on a par with Einstein and Newton. Yet very little of what he wrote still exists because of the passage of time, and because many copies of his w…
00:05:16 |
Thu 13 Nov 2008
Improving Stents - Part 2
Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood
vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing
vessels and keeping them open so that blood…
00:05:45 |
Thu 13 Nov 2008
Improving Stents - Part 1
Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood
vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing
vessels and keeping them open so that blood…
00:07:18 |
Thu 13 Nov 2008
Steering Towards Efficiency
The racing team is just as important to a car.s finish as the driver is. With little to
separate competitors over hundreds of laps, teams search for any technological
edge that will propel them to Vi…
00:07:39 |
Thu 28 Aug 2008
Going with the Floes - Part 4
Sea ice is one of the least understood components of our climate. Naturally its abundance or scarcity is a telling sign of climate change, but sea ice is also an important actor in change as well, in…
00:07:50 |
Thu 05 Jun 2008
Going with the Floes - Part 3
Sea ice is one of the least understood components of our climate. Naturally its abundance or scarcity is a telling sign of climate change, but sea ice is also an important actor in change as well, in…
00:10:35 |
Thu 05 Jun 2008
Going with the Floes - Part 1
Sea ice is one of the least understood components of our climate. Naturally its abundance or scarcity is a telling sign of climate change, but sea ice is also an important actor in change as well, in…
00:10:15 |
Thu 05 Jun 2008
Hearing a Master.s Voice
The spools of wire below contain the only known live recording of the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie. A mathematician, Kevin Short, was part of a team that used signal processing techniques asso…
00:04:47 |
Thu 05 Jun 2008
Going with the Floes - Part 2
Sea ice is one of the least understood components of our climate. Naturally its abundance or scarcity is a telling sign of climate change, but sea ice is also an important actor in change as well, in…
00:07:57 |
Thu 05 Jun 2008
Bending It Like Bernoulli
The colored "strings" you see represent air flow around the soccer ball, with the dark blue streams behind the ball signifying a low-pressure wake. Computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel experi…
00:08:14 |
Mon 14 Apr 2008
Tripping the Light-Fantastic
Invisibility is no longer confined to fiction. In a recent experiment, microwaves
were bent around a cylinder and returned to their original trajectories, rendering
the cylinder almost invisible at t…
00:08:14 |
Thu 14 Feb 2008
Unearthing Power Lines
Votes are cast by the full membership in each house of Congress, but much of the important maneuvering occurs in committees. Graph theory and linear algebra are two mathematics subjects that have rev…
00:08:14 |
Thu 14 Feb 2008
Folding for Fun and Function
Origami paper-folding may not seem like a subject for mathematical investigation
or one with sophisticated applications, yet anyone who has tried to fold a
road map or wrap a present knows that origa…
00:08:14 |
Thu 14 Feb 2008
Making Votes Count
The outcome of elections that offer more than two alternatives but with no preference by a majority, is determined more by the voting procedure used than by the votes themselves. Mathematicians have …
00:08:14 |
Thu 14 Feb 2008
Pinpointing Style
A team examining digital photos of drawings used modern mathematical transforms
known as wavelets to quantify attributes of a collection of 16th century master.s drawings. The analysis revealed measu…
00:06:35 |
Wed 26 Dec 2007
Predicting Storm Surge
Storm surge is often the most devastating part of a hurricane. Mathematical models used to predict surge must incorporate the effects of winds, atmospheric pressure, tides, waves and river flows, as …
00:12:09 |
Wed 26 Dec 2007
Putting Music on the Map
Mathematics and music have long been closely associated. Now a recent mathematical
breakthrough uses topology (a generalization of geometry) to represent musical chords as points in a space called an…
00:08:38 |
Wed 26 Dec 2007
Finding Fake Photos
Actually, they weren.t caught together at all their images were put together with software. The shadows cast by the stars. faces give it away: The sun is coming from two different directions on the s…
00:08:14 |
Wed 26 Dec 2007
Targeting Tumors
Detection and treatment of cancer have progressed, but neither is as precise as
doctors would like. For example, tumors can change shape or location between
pre-operative diagnosis and treatment so t…
00:09:24 |
Wed 26 Dec 2007
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