The Official MathGeek Blog

Fahrenheit 451

In his pastel-yellow house in upscale Cheviot Hills, where he has lived for more than 50 years, Bradbury greeted me in his sitting room. He wore his now-standard outfit of a blue dress shirt with a white collar and a jack-o’-lantern tie (Halloween is his favorite day) and white socks. This ensemble is in keeping with Bradbury’s arrested development. George Clayton Johnson, who gave us Logan’s Run, says, “Ray has always been 14 going on 15.”

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. More...

05-06-07

Numerologists: Your moment is about to arrive. Mathematicians and lottery players: You may want to pay attention, too. On Sunday, at 02:03:04 a.m. on 05/06/07, time will align itself in a perfect pattern, 2-3-4-5-6-7.

For those who slept though last year's 1-2-3-4-5-6 moment at 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on April, 5, 2006, this is your second chance.

"There are numerical patterns in nature all around us," says Edward Burger, who teaches mathematics at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. "Some are more significant and some are more beautiful than others. And this one is a silly one."

Silly, yes. And a moment that will not come again for another century, in 2107. Of course, the times and dates will align sequentially once every year until 9:10 and 11 seconds on Dec. 13, 2014, or 9-10-11-12-13-14. After that, time will revert to its usual untidy mix of hours, minutes and seconds passing through the days of our lives. More...

Mathematica 6

Building on two decades of world-class algorithm and software development, Mathematica 6 represents a dramatic breakthrough that immensely broadens Mathematica's scope and applicability—and redefines the very way we think about computation. Made possible by Mathematica's unique symbolic architecture, Mathematica 6 introduces a sweeping unification of language and interface concepts that makes possible a new level of automation in algorithmic computation, interactive manipulation and dynamic presentation—as well as a whole new way of interacting with the world of data. More...

Click here for the new Mathematica 6 Demonstration Site.