Everything you wanted to know about pi but were afraid to ask
Ghost in the Machine A clever way to foil an evil ghost possessing your computer is to ask it compute all the digits of π. Spock did just that in a scene from the classic Star Trek episode Wolf in the Fold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab6ohaNKjbs?start=22&end=53 But what exactly is π? It’s a number of course, but not like the counting numbers 1,…
Interview with a mathematician: Richard J. Nowakowski
In the first of what I hope is an ongoing series of interviews with fellow mathematicians, here is my conversation with Richard J. Nowakowski. We sometimes just call him RJN for short. Richard works on graph theory and combinatorial game theory at Dalhousie University, where he is a University Research Professor. He completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees under…
Judging NSERC Discovery Grants
As a follow up to my earlier blog about the Competition Week at NSERC, in the present post I share insights into the judging process for Discovery Grants. NSERC received hundreds of applications evaluated by the Mathematics and Statistics Evaluation Group (EG) 1508 this year. The role of the 34 mathematicians and statisticians on the EG was to vet these…
The mathematician who plays professional football
You don’t usually read about spectral graph theory and professional football in the same sentence. Meet John Urschel.