Dear Kitty. Some blog

From the New York Times in the USA:

Britain: Apology to Gay Mathematician

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: September 11, 2009

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Friday to the mathematician Alan Turing, who committed suicide in 1954 after he was tried and convicted of “gross indecency” for being homosexual.

Mr. Brown said that Turing had been treated “terribly” and that the outcome of World War II could have been quite different had it not been for Turing’s efforts in cracking German codes, notably the Enigma coding machine. Turing is often hailed for his influence on modern computing. Thousands of people have signed a petition calling for a formal apology from the government, though Turing has no known surviving family, The Daily Telegraph reported. Writing in the newspaper, Mr. Brown said: “On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: We’re sorry. You deserved so much better.” Turing was sentenced, as an alternative to prison, to chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones, the prime minister noted.

See also here.

Comment: Brown’s apology to Alan Turing is not good enough: here. And here.

Homophobia in Britain: here. And here.

Gay Australians want marriage, not partnerships: here.

GAY RIGHTS IN THE FORMER EAST GERMAN DDR: here.

UGANDA - ON THE CUSP OF INTRODUCING DEATH PENALTY FOR GAYS: here.

From the American Chemical Society:

Arabic chemists from the ‘Golden Age’ given long overdue credit

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — You’ve heard of Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver, no doubt. And probably Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Names like Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, and Amadeo Avogadro may even bring a twinkle of recognition to the eye for their famous roles in establishing chemistry as a modern science.

But what about Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (”Rhazes”)? Or Jabir ibn Hayyan (”Geber”)? Or Abu Jusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. Huh?

“You should know them,” Benjamin Huddle, Ph.D., declared in a report presented here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. They’re chemists from the Golden Age of Arabic-Islamic Science, which stretched from the 8th to the 13th centuries. During this era, science and medicine in Muslim countries — from southern Europe through North Africa to Central Asia and India — flourished and was unrivaled anywhere in the world. Muslim physicians and scientists made advancements that built the foundations for the emergence of modern science and medicine in Europe.

“Science in the early Muslim period is largely forgotten today in the Western world, or relegated to pseudo-science,” Huddle said. “We are rediscovering the fact that from 750 to 1258 A.D. the best science in the world was being done by Arabic-speaking peoples. In chemistry we use language from the Arabs, apparatus and techniques, many chemicals (especially perfumes), and many materials.”

Huddle did his research on the Golden Age, which produced a portrait of Arabic-Islamic love for learning and reverence for education and knowledge that defies popular modern stereotypes.

This video says about itself:

Sound project (audio only) using Danish poet Inger Christensen’s long poem “It” (translated Susanna Nied). Section 1 of Prologos : 66 Voices reading a 66 line stanza.

From British daily The Independent:

Inger Christensen: Experimental poet who used mathematical structures in her work

Monday, 2 February 2009

Inger Christensen was one of Denmark’s most innovative experimental poets. She is perhaps best known for her major poem “Alfabet” (“Alphabet”, 1981), a systematic work which uses the letters from “a” (beginning with apricots) to “n” (nights), coupled with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8…), representing growth in nature.

Christensen was born in 1935 in Vejle, on the eastern coast of Denmark. Following high school and teacher training college she taught for two years at the College for Arts in Holbæk and subsequently chose to take up writing full time, a decision in which she was encouraged by Poul Borum, whom she married in 1959. Her first volumes of poetry, which emerged during this period, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), examine the relationship between creativity, language, perception and the self.

A larger collection of poetry, Det (It), was published in 1969 and reflected an era of upheaval and social change across the Western world. A poem from this volume, “The Action: symmetries”, chants in frustration:

Society can be so petrified
That it’s all one solid block
Inhabitants so ossified
That life’s in a state of shock

From another poem by Inger Christensen:

ice ages exists, ice ages exists,
ice of the arctics and ice of the kingfisher;
cicadas exist, chicory, chrome
and the chrome yellow iris, the blue iris; oxygen
indeed; also ice floes in the arctic ocean,
polar bears exist, as fur inscribed
with an individual number he exists, condemned to his life;
& the kingfisher’s mini-drop into the ice-blue rivers

(from ‘Alphabet 9, 10′, in Alphabet, trans. by Pierre Joris)

Racism in Denmark: here.

This is a video of a discussion in the USA about the Clovis comet theory about the Pleistocene.

From ScienceDaily:

Egalitarian Revolution In The Pleistocene?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2008) — Although anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are still debating this question, a new study supports the view that the first egalitarian societies may have appeared tens of thousands of years before the French Revolution, Marx, and Lenin [see also here].

These societies emerged rapidly through intense power struggle and their origin had dramatic implications for humanity. In many mammals living in groups, including hyenas, meerkats, and dolphins, group members form coalitions and alliances that allow them to increase their dominance status and their access to mates and other resources. Alliances are especially common in great apes, some of whom have very intense social life, where they are constantly engaged in a political maneuvering as vividly described in Frans de Waal’s “Chimpanzee politics”.

In spite of this, the great apes’ societies are very hierarchical with each animal occupying a particular place in the existing dominance hierarchy. A major function of coalitions in apes is to maintain or change the dominance ranking. When an alpha male is well established, he usually can intimidate any hostile coalition or the entire community.

In sharp contrast, most known hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian. Their weak leaders merely assist a consensus-seeking process when the group needs to make decisions, but otherwise all main political actors behave as equal. Some anthropologists argue that in egalitarian societies the pyramid of power is turned upside down with potential subordinates being able to express dominance over potential alpha-individuals by creating large, group-wide political alliance.

What were the reasons for such a drastic change in the group’s social organization during the origin of our own “uniquely unique” species? Some evolutionary biologists theorize that at some point in the Pleistocene, humans reached a level of ecological dominance that dramatically transformed the natural selection landscape. Instead of traditional “hostile forces of nature”, the competitive interactions among members of the same group became the most dominant evolutionary factor. According to this still controversial view, known as the “social brain” or “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis, more intelligent individuals were able to take advantage of other members of their group, achieve higher social status, and leave more offspring who inherited their parent’s genes for larger brain size and intelligence. As a result of this runaway process, the average brain size and intelligence were increasing across the whole human lineage.

Also increasing were the abilities to keep track of within-group social interactions, to remember friends and their allies and enemies, and to attract and use allies. At some point, physically weaker members of the group started forming successful and stable large coalitions against strong individuals who otherwise would achieve alpha-status and usurp the majority of the crucial resources. Eventually, an egalitarian society was established. Although some of its components are well supported by data, this scenario remains highly controversial. One reason is its complexity which makes it difficult to interpret the data and to intuit the consequences of interactions between multiple evolutionary, ecological, behavioral, and social factors acting simultaneously. It is also tricky to evaluate relevant time-scales and figure out possible evolutionary dynamics.

A new article in PLoS One makes steps towards answering these challenges. The paper is co-authored by Sergey Gavrilets, a theoretical evolutionary biologist, and two computer scientists, Edgar Duenez-Guzman and Michael Vose, all from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The researchers built a complex mathematical model describing the process of alliance formation which they then studied using analytical methods and large-scale numerical simulations. The model focuses on a group of individuals who vary strongly in their fighting abilities. If all conflicts were exclusively between pairs of individuals, a hierarchy would emerge with a few strongest individuals getting most of the resource. However, there is also a tendency (very small initially) for individuals to interfere in an ongoing dyadic conflict thus biasing its outcome one way or another. Positive outcomes of such interferences increase the affinities between individuals while negative outcomes decrease them. Naturally, larger coalitions have higher probability of winning a conflict.

Gavrilets and colleagues identified conditions under which alliances can emerge in the group: increasing group size, growing awareness of ongoing conflicts, better abilities in attracting allies and building complex coalitions, and better memories of past events.

Most interestingly, the model shows that the shift from a group with no alliances to one or more alliances typically occurs suddenly, within several generations, in a phase-transition like fashion. Even more surprisingly, under certain conditions (which include some cultural inheritance of social networks) a single alliance comprising all members of the group can emerge in which resources are divided evenly. That is, the competition among non-equal individuals can paradoxically result in their eventual equality.

Gavrilets and colleagues argue that such an “egalitarian revolution” could also follow a change in the mating system that would increase father-son social bonds or an increase in fidelity of cultural inheritance of social networks. Interestingly, the fact that mother-daughter social bonds are often very strong in apes suggests (everything else being the same) that females could more easily achieve egalitarian societies.

The model also highlights the importance of the presence of outsiders (or “scapegoats”) for stability of small alliances. The researchers suggest that the establishment of a stable group-wide egalitarian alliance should create conditions promoting the origin of conscience, moralistic aggression, altruism, and other cultural norms favoring group interests over those of individuals. Increasing within-group cohesion should also promote the group efficiency in between-group conflicts and intensify cultural group selection.

“Our language probably emerged to simplify the formation and improve the efficiency of coalitions and alliances,” says Gavrilets. The scientists caution that one should be careful in applying their model to contemporary humans (whether members of modern societies or hunter-gathers). In contemporary humans, an individual’s decision to join coalitions is strongly affected by his/her estimates of costs, benefits, and risks associated as well as by cultural beliefs and traditions. These are the factors explicitly left outside of the modeling framework.

In humans, a secondary transition from egalitarian societies to hierarchical states took place as the first civilizations were emerging. How can it be understood in terms of the model discussed? One can speculate that technological and cultural advances made the coalition size much less important in controlling the outcome of a conflict than the individuals’ ability to directly control and use resources (e.g. weapons, information, food) that strongly influence the outcomes of conflicts.

Journal reference:

1. Gavrilets et al. Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. PLoS ONE, 2008; 3 (10): e3293 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003293

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

From The Times, in London, England:

Why a Nile tadpole means a great deal

Ancient Egypt’s awkward numerical system was based largely on the natural world

George Hart

Recording numbers and quantities was one of the first requirements of the bureaucracy as soon as hieroglyphs had been invented. Items to be accounted for varied from enemies slain in battle and prisoners to how many jars of beer or bunches of onions were needed to accompany the Pharaoh into the afterlife. Inventories of equipment used in temples were kept meticulously and any damage noted down.

The system of writing numbers was logical but cumbersome and took up a lot of space. A vertical or horizontal stroke indicated numbers 1 to 9, a hobble for cattle 10 to 90, a coil of rope 100 to 900 and a lotus 1,000 to 9,000. For higher numerals 10,000 was represented by a finger raised for counting and 100,000 by a tadpole – of which myriads would emerge in the pools left by the Nile’s annual flood. The concept of a million was confined to royal propaganda to convey the sense of the infinite number of years for which the Pharaoh and his monuments would exist. The notation took the form of a god with his arms raised to support the sky.

Where do you find hieroglyphs? See here.

How to read hieroglyphs: here.

Nubian pharaohs: here.

This video is about the the three laws of physics of Sir Isaac Newton.

From ScienceDaily:

Indians Predated Newton ‘Discovery’ By 250 Years, Scholars Say

A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton — according to new research.

Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the ‘Kerala School‘ identified the ‘infinite series‘- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.

The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries.

The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.

And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself.

Dr Joseph made the revelations while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book ‘The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics‘ by Princeton University Press.

He said: “The beginnings of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries have been ignored or forgotten.

“The brilliance of Newton’s work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished — especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.

“But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series.

“There were many reasons why the contribution of the Kerala school has not been acknowledged - a prime reason is neglect of scientific ideas emanating from the Non-European world - a legacy of European colonialism and beyond.

“But there is also little knowledge of the medieval form of the local language of Kerala, Malayalam, in which some of most seminal texts, such as the Yuktibhasa, from much of the documentation of this remarkable mathematics is written.

Play on mathematics: here.

India in the 1920s: here.

This video is called The Death of Alan Turing.

By Anindya Bhattacharyya:

Science You Can’t See: Dangerous Knowledge

Decent science documentaries are few and far between these days. They have been a prominent casualty of the commercialisation and cost-cutting that has hit the television industry.

So it’s a pleasure to see Science You Can’t See, a season of intelligent but accessible programmes looking at the breakthroughs in our understanding of the world.

Dangerous Knowledge looks at the work of mathematicians such as George Cantor, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who transformed our understanding of what mathematics is.

The presenter David Malone does a good job of explaining the ideas of Cantor and Gödel without losing sight of the social and historical context of their work.

It’s a shame, however, that the documentary puts so much stress on the cliché of the “mad genius”. Cantor and Gödel both suffered from mental illness throughout their life, and Turing was persecuted for being gay, eventually committing suicide.

Malone implies that these tragic facts are in some way linked to the work of these men – as if exploring the foundations of mathematics and logic somehow sent them “over the edge”.

This is a profoundly conservative vision of science, reminiscent of ancient mythology and its stories of humanity being punished by the gods for its intellectual curiosity. It marrs an otherwise excellent documentary.

Science You Can’t See: Dangerous Knowledge
BBC4 Wednesday 8 August, 9pm

Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan here.

From New Scientist:

Women told that female under-achievement in mathematics is due to genetic factors perform much worse on maths tests than those told that social factors are responsible.

These new findings could have serious implications not only for the way the subject is taught in schools, but for public discussions about genetic influences on behaviour.

It may also inform debates about why women are under-represented in university mathematics and science departments.

The question of whether there might be gender differences in mathematical ability remains contentious.

Earlier this year, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, resigned in response to an outcry over his speculation on the topic.

He said one reason women are under-represented in science and engineering jobs could be because of a “different availability of aptitude at the high end”.

(Read and watch a debate between Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on ‘The Science of Gender and Science’ in the wake of Lawrence Summers’ speech)

Serious impact

“As our research demonstrates, just hearing about that sort of idea is enough to negatively affect women’s performance, and reproduce the stereotype that is out there,” says Steven Heine at the University of British Columbia, Canada, who led the new study.

Whether true or not, the stereotype of innate sex differences does exist in mathematics departments, and it can have a serious impact, agrees Peter Hall at the Mathematical Sciences Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra, and president of the Australian Mathematical Society.

“It can be very forbidding for a young woman to come up against that generalisation – and that’s one of the environmental factors that has kept women out of not just maths but science,” he says.

Nature or nurture?

Heine and colleague Ilan Dar-Nimrod told 220 women that there are definite sex differences in maths performance.

One group was then told that genetic factors were the cause.

Another group was told that experiences with studying maths were responsible – that women do worse than men because of the way their teachers interacted with them in elementary school, for instance.

The impact on subsequent mathematics tests was pronounced, with the “genes” group getting about half as many correct answers as the “experiential” group.

See also here.

And here.

And here.

I am not a maths specialist.

However, half as many correct answers to me means that a woman who would have gotten 10 out of 10 correct answers, and might probably have been best of the class, gets only 5 out of 10 right when feeling under pressure of stereotypes.

5 out of 10: bad enough to not pass an examination.

And a woman who, without prejudices voiced in the classroom, might have gotten 6 out of 10 answers correct (not brilliant, but enough to pass an examination) might get only 3 out of 10 with prejudices: a miserable failure.

So, practically all women would fail: if prejudice would be voiced.

It would be interesting to have similar experiments involving people of classes or so called races about whom Rightist ‘genetic’ prejudices exist.

Women mathematicians: here.

Study: Girls in Sexist Societies Worse at Math: here.

Mr and Mrs Einstein-Maric: here.

Women and science careers: here.

Women and chess: here.

Mathematics in ancient Egypt: here.

Leopard picture courtesy www.wildlife-pictures-online.com

From Biology News Net:

Model of Changing Leopard Spots

R. T. Liu, S. S. Liaw, and P. K. Maini

Physical Review E

Leopard’s spots and Zebra’s stripes inspired the ancient myths famously retold in Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

They also led legendary mathematician Alan Turing to suggest that some patterns in nature are due to various chemicals, or morphogens, diffusing across surfaces and forming shapes where they interact.

Few Turing-type models, however, addressed the fact that such patterns may evolve over time.

A two-stage variation of Turing’s model, recently developed by physicists at Taiwan’s National Chung-Hsing University and Oxford’s Mathematical Institute, duplicates the changes in the patterns on leopards and jaguars as the animals age.

Both felines sport simple spots when they are kittens.

By the time they’re adults, Jaguar’s spots have turned to polygons, while Leopard wears rosettes.

The researchers’ model replicates the changes each of the species experiences, provided that the model parameters are tuned in different ways after the initial spots have formed.

No one has ever found the morphogens that might be responsible for decorative animal pelts, which potentially makes Turing pattern morphogens the “Just So Story” of modern biology.

Still, the researchers are encouraged by the fact that their model easily accounts for the big cats’ complex and changing patterns, and are hopeful that experimentalists will soon track morphogen chemicals down.

Adult cheetahs have simple spots, somewhat like leopard kittens.

Cheetah kittens are spotlessly grayish.

Cheetahs of Iran: here.

Leopard, spotted hyena (see also here), lion video: here.

Leopard and cheetah video: here.

Far eastern leopard: here.

First photos of leopards in Cambodia: here.

Malaysian leopards mostly black: here.

Amur leopards: here; and here.

Amur tigers: here.

Amur tiger numbers on the increase: here.

Big cats in medieval Tower of London: here.

Privately owned big cats in Britain today: here.

Poaching of lions in India: here.

Spotted hyenas: here.

Spotted hyenas can increase survival rates by hunting alone: here.