The traveling salesman problem, or TSP for short, is easy to state: given a number of 'cities' along with the cost of travel between each pair of them, find the cheapest way of visiting all the cities and returning to your starting point. The simplicity of the statement is deceptive - the TSP is one of the most intensely studied problems in comp...
Creator:
Cook, William (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Created:
2002-10-16
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
The first completely sequenced genome, the virus Lambda at 50,000 nucleotides, was sequenced via the shotgun method by Sanger and coworkers at Cambridge in 1981. The shotgun method consists of randomly sampling and determining 500-700 nucleotide 'reads' and then assembling them to reconstruct the sampled sequence. It was long believed that this ...
Creator:
Myers, Gene (University of California, Berkeley)
Created:
2003-05-06
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
The Human Genome Project has catalyzed the emergence of a new approach to biology termed systems biology. Systems biology analyzes all the interrelationships of the elements in a biological system, rather than studying them one at a time, as has been the modus operandi in biology for the past 30 years. This systems approach has also emerged in t...
Creator:
Hood, Leroy E. (Institute for Systems Biology)
Created:
2003-09-15
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
Throughout his life, either as participant, support individual, or involved spectator, the speaker has been involved in some aspect of drag racing. As such he has witnessed the birth and growth of many myths concerning dragster speed and acceleration. In this talk the speaker uses his mathematical training to identify rather elementary mathemati...
Creator:
Tapia, Richard (Rice University)
Created:
2003-11-20
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
Secrets of the heart include the changes in the circulation occurring at birth, the muscular fiber architecture of the cardiac ventricles, the collagen fiber architecture of the heart valves, the electrical activity that coordinates and controls the heartbeat, and the vortex flow patterns of blood in the cardiac chambers. In this lecture, mathem...
Creator:
Peskin, Charles S. (New York University)
Created:
2003-06-05
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
Frustrated by difficulties in explaining seemingly aberrant financial market behavior using contemporary methods of financial economics, a new school of behavioral finance has arisen that mixes psychology and economics. Despite the superficial appeal of this multi-disciplinary approach, this talk critiques behavioral finance by using the analyti...
Creator:
Ross, Stephen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Created:
2004-03-30
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
Is there something remarkable about the great precision and subtlety of the mathematical laws that appear to govern, in full detail, the behavior of the physical universe? Or do the perceived laws of physics merely reflect our own attempts to make some order out of the complication of observed physical action? Are all our own actions governed co...
Creator:
Penrose, Roger FRS (University of Oxford)
Created:
2004-10-05
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
What caused hundreds of Japanese children to fall into seizures while watching an episode of the cartoon show Pokemon? Why do women roommates sometimes find that their menstrual periods occur in sync?The tendency to synchronize is one of the most mysterious and pervasive drives in all of nature. Every night along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, th...
Creator:
Strogatz, Steven H. (Cornell University)
Created:
2004-01-07
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
The rise in divorce rates in developed countries, including the US, is a widespread, important and poorly understood phenomenon. The benefits of happy marriages are clear. Laboratory methods have been developed to observe interactions of couples to identify patterns that are predictive of divorce or whether the couple will be unhappily married.M...
Creator:
Murray, James D. (University of Washington)
Created:
2004-11-18
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.
3D optical elements modulate light through interaction with an entirevolume of variable refractive index (as opposed to a sequence of surfacesused in traditional optics.) One commonly used form of 3D optics isgradient-index (GRIN) where the modulation is base-band. Instead, we haveemphasized use of modulations on a spatial carrier (grating.) We ...
Creator:
Barbastathis, George (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Created:
2005-11-11
Contributed By:
University of Minnesota, Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.