Zipf's law arose out of an analysis of language by linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who theorised that given a large body of language (that is, a long book — or every word uttered by Plus employees during the day), the frequency of each word is close to inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. We thought we would test this out on Plus. What does this imply about how we use language and how it evolved?

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posted by westius @ 3:54 PM

1 Comments:

At 3:41 PM,  Cassandra said...

Is it really a mystery? I have at least one idea off the top of my head.

Since one of the ways you can construct power law distributed networks (competitive scale networks) is through growth/decay rules (e.g. the next added link will have the highest probability of connecting to the node with the higher degree or existing connections) and thinking a little about how language evolves by adopting and abandoning words, it seems likely that words frequency could follow a power law because they are added to and removed from over time with a similar set of rules (at some level).

The only question is what exactly do such network nodes and their degrees map to?

Nodes seems map to words or perhaps the idea represented by the word or word-sound or word-ideas. If the nodes map to ideas then there is also a link to memes and various mind-external scale-free structures.

Nodal degree seems to related to usage of the word - either simply the frequency of usage or something deeper that results in that frequency.

 

Mathematics is often used to study evolution, whether that be the evolution of animal species, the evolution of viruses or the evolution of language. A recent study has taken this one step further by modelling the evolution of national cuisine, and it was found that even though there are wall-to-wall celebrity chefs on television these days trying to broaden our culinary horizons, our cultural cuisines are largely the same as they were almost 100 years ago.

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posted by westius @ 2:15 PM

0 Comments:

After every Olympics, there is speculation about which country performed best. Should we really be surprised when China, with its huge population, and the US, with its combination of high GDP and population, top the medal table? Can we take a look at the medal tables and see which countries did indeed perform better than expected?

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posted by westius @ 10:29 AM

10 Comments:

At 4:35 PM,  Anonymous said...

What about factoring the availability of drugs into the model?

 

At 11:13 PM,  Will said...

The model provided by the fancy pants bureau thingy is stupid.

it has A(Log[X])+B(Log[Y/X]), which is the same as A(Log[X])+B(Log[Y])-B(Log[X]), which is the same as (A-B)(Log[X])+B(Log[Y), and as A and B are just constants, A-B can be anything. say C. They've added in a completely unneccesary element.

 

At 1:19 PM,  Martin Collett said...

There's a simple comparison of the 2008 Beijing medals results scaled by GDP, population, etc at http://www.channel4.com/olympics

 

At 1:32 PM,  Anonymous said...

Interesting post. This article in the Wall Street Journal has some good history on medal tables.
http://www.wsj.com/article/SB121856271893833843.html?mod=psp_free_today

 

At 9:35 AM,  Anonymous said...

check out this widget that gives an interactive interface for analyzing medals per GDP, population, etc.

http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/48abc6bc903b61d0

Apparently created by a new online data modelling tool - www.youcalc.com - which I have not had time to test tey.

 

At 8:14 PM,  Anonymous said...

Interesting read here:

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/22082008/389/gold-medal-really-worth.html

Analysis of UK funding of sports and it's effect on medals

 

At 3:51 PM,  Anonymous said...

Then why does India do so badly at the games?

 

At 10:35 AM,  Mike said...

WELL statistics and dam statistics. The problem is your raw data is wrong and as with all statistics the way you look at is partial. Is there a relation between GDP and medals, should there be? Difficult to say, I would have thought it is about social structure and expectations as well. GB did well in various areas because there was an expectation, resources and talent coming together and it did badly in others because one or more of these was missing.

 

At 2:21 PM,  westius said...

Mike, if our data is wrong, you should let us know in which areas it is and we can fix it. Some of the data points may have changed, but they were correct at the time of writing.

 

At 1:30 PM,  Anonymous said...

So, what are the predictions for 2012? What are the variables to consider?

 

London science blogging conference

posted by westius @ 11:13 AM

0 Comments:

Disney Pixar have just released the movie, WALL-E. A bleak, post-apocalyptic tour-de-force, the movie depicts the gentle romance between two robots of the future: WALL-E, the not-so-bright and not-so-attractive "guy" with the big heart and sweet personality, and EVE, the sleek, sexy, totally out-of-his-league babe.

Pixar designed these robots so that we see them as human. But what exactly is WALL-E? Is he pure fantasy and speculative fiction? Or is he — is artificial intelligence — simply the way of the future?

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posted by westius @ 11:45 AM

3 Comments:

At 10:57 AM,  Patrick Andrews said...

"Instead of programming a computer to abide by the traditional step-by-step rules approach, we model it like the neurons in the human brain where the results of the program depend on the "strengths" of each particular neuron."

Neural computing runs on a computer...it too is algorithmic.

It seems to me that people are algorithmic as well but that each of our internal programs can achieve intuitive leaps, insights and creative ideas by accepting as input, data in many different forms...eg a certain spreadsheet of numerical data can be interpreted, from across the room as a portrait of Einstein.

 

At 2:54 PM,  Anonymous said...

The reason why computers will never be 'human', is because human reasoning, morality and intellect is not optimal. If a machine should have the computational power to rival human thinking, pressing it into the mold of a human brain will be diametrically opposed to the aims of such a machine. We like to consider ourselves to be the pinnacle of evolution, but we are forgetting that i) evolution is an on-going process, and ii) humans are not as clever as all that. In fact, looking around you, from Big Brother to the Iraq war, would a computer with a vast intelligence feel nothing but derision for our species?

 

At 5:09 PM,  Terry said...

I agree with many of the comments left by Patrick Andrews.
It seems to me that the advancement of artificial intelligence is handicapped to a considerable extent by the intellectual capacity of the computer technocrat.
Using a trivial example to illustrate, while working for the now-defunct computer manufacturer Sperry Univac, I asked a visiting VP what the company's position was following IBM's introduction of its (then) 'Personal Computer'. He replied that the company regarded the PC as a fad and the future was in mainframe computers! It is this level of intellect that presents the handicap mentioned earlier.
Some years later, I was to have discussions with Professor Donald Michie of Edinburgh University about what he considered to be a problem in "pattern matching". Basically, the problem was to take a large amount of information about daily trading in a retail environement and establish through analysis what represented 'normal' trading. By this means, what repesented 'abnormal' trading could be established. It was abnormal trading that was the holy grail being sought in this particular excercise. Sadly, we did not get very much further than stating the problem. The overall solution, though, was believed to lie in the computer's ability to learn from key factors in the environment of the problem. It was this ability, residing in the human counterpart (given the right degrees of application, intellect and experience), that could provide answers for discrete cases, albeit at the expense of considerable time and effort.
Terry Schooling

 

Who is your favourite fictional mathematician?

posted by westius @ 12:06 PM

27 Comments:

At 4:06 PM,  Anonymous said...

Bourbaki

 

At 4:14 PM,  Julia said...

If you're thinking about fictional mathematicians in print, there are quite a few others who might make the list. How about the title character from Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis (you can read a MAA review by Keith Devlin at http://www.maa.org/reviews/petros.html)? Or Daisy Love from Jeff Noon's Nymphomation? Hobbs Baranov from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition? Or the narrator from The Oxford Murders, recently also made into a film?....

 

At 4:40 PM,  westius said...

From a colleague:

The protagonist of Sam Peckinpah's film Straw Dogs is a mathematician
not on your list. Also not on your list is the maths student protagonist of Krystof Zanussi's (Polish) film "The constant".

 

At 4:42 PM,  westius said...

From another colleague:

Of Prof Moriaty:

It was written that: 'He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature
with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him.

But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London....'

'Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book
which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?'

 

At 6:03 PM,  Anonymous said...

Moriarty

 

At 6:48 PM,  Anonymous said...

Please may we have a simple .cgi voting page for this poll? I hate having to install plugins, particularly those which take up a lot of cycles like flash.

He's not fictional (prof. Comeau, the Stellan Starsgard character, is) but I like Matt whoever's question "who's the most famous living American pure mathematician?" in Good Will Hunting. The answer is Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

My initial inclination is to vote for Yakima, the hero of Greg Egan's Diaspora, but that's because I really like the book as a whole. Another candidate, a great contrast with the former, would be Myron Aub who rediscovers mental arithmetic in Asimov's The Feeling of Power. More reflection is required.

 

At 9:11 PM,  Anonymous said...

There's also Kate Gunzinger from the film 'It's My Turn' (see here) - this film is in fact given by Weibel in his Introduction to Homological Algebra as a reference for the Snake Lemma, a proof of which opens the film.

 

At 12:21 AM,  Anonymous said...

I wouldn't call here my favourite character but Barbara Sabich - Harrison Ford's wife in Presumed Innocent - is a mathematician (I think we hear this in the scene where she complains about how long it has taken her to get tenure).
A minor, behind the scenes character, but one without whom there would be no story.

 

At 1:35 PM,  Anna Faherty said...

I have voted for 'The Square' but wonder if 'Count von Count' from Sesame Street should be included? He has certainly promoted the joy of numbers and counting to generations of kids around the world!

 

At 8:34 AM,  Anonymous said...

The list is definitely too "english-centered". You are missing many fictional mathematicians in non-English spoken movies. So, the question of the poll should be: "Who is your favourite English-speaking fictional mathematician"?
E.g.: have you seen the Argentinian movie "Il treno di Moebius" ("The Moebius train")?

 

At 8:42 PM,  Anonymous said...

The Count from Sesame Street gets our vote.

 

At 7:46 AM,  PiXnic said...

How about John Nash - a beautiful mind? Although he isn't my favourite I still love the comment "I am a well balanced individual I have a chip on both shoulders".

 

At 8:43 AM,  KatieG said...

How about David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) in Independence Day? Does he count as a mathematician??

 

At 9:26 AM,  Sandy Starr said...

One of the mathematicians on your list is Max Cohen from the film 'Pi' (played by Sean Gullette), but I'd prefer to nominate Cohen's mentor in the same film, Sol Robeson (played by Mark Margolis). When Cohen becomes obsessed with finding patterns in the digits of pi (π), Robeson quite rightly rebukes him, saying that he's no longer a mathematician but rather a numerologist.

 

At 6:31 AM,  Anonymous said...

John Nash isn't a fictional character...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash

 

At 9:55 AM,  gary thomson said...

I voted for Prof Calculus but I'm not sure he was strictly a mathematician.

How about James Harris that guy is unreal.

 

At 12:21 PM,  Beans said...

Wouldn't you say that "The Doctor" is a fictional character? And I have reason to believe that he's not too bad a mathematician himself!

(But then again is he really fictional?!)

 

At 12:58 PM,  Olivier Schwimmer said...

There is at least another mathematician in another Michael Crichton's novel: Harry Adams in Sphere (also a movie) and his character is important in the plot.

Other side comments:
a) I concur that this list looks very english literature-centered but it is likely to evolve as more comments and references are made.

Two recent examples of novels with mathematician characters:

- Hans Singer in "Villa des Hommes" by Denis Guedj (closely copied from Cantor's character)

- Arthur Seldom in "Crímenes imperceptibles" (aka "The Oxford Murders")

b) John Nash is of course a real person, but his image in the Holywood dramatization of Silvia Nasar's pseudo biography A Beautiful Mind is a complete fiction who never existed except in the script of the film.

 

At 1:54 PM,  gary thomson said...

There is a female mathematician in Scarlett Thomas' Popco. The main charecter is Alice Butler and her grandmother is portrayed as having been one of the few women mathematicians at Bletchley Park.

 

At 3:23 PM,  David Thompson said...

There are numerous references to fictional mathematicians and mathematical fiction at http://math.cofc.edu/kasman/MATHFICT/. I would vote for Professor James Darnley McCorkle in "The Chair of Philanthromathematics" by O Henry.

 

At 3:16 AM,  Alain said...

Verushka Graef in The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks.

The interesting about her is that she is interesting.

 

At 8:54 AM,  MadeleineS said...

To the anonymous commenter who said "have you seen the Argentinian movie "Il treno di Moebius" ("The Moebius train")?" The answer is that we have tried and tried to see this film but cannot get a copy for public screening in the UK. It would have been part of the Edinburgh Maths at the Movies Festival last April if it had been possible. I can't speak for the USA but it's been seen by very few people in the UK because it's only ever been screened at few film festivals shortly after release.

This film, however, is based on one of my all time favourite short stories "A Subway named Mobius" by Prof. A.J. Deutsch at Harvard. It was actually written about the New York subway system. Tupelo, the topologist who solved the problem, should be on the voting list but I'm afraid he was originally an English speaking New Yorker.
http://scifipedia.scifi.com/index.php/A_Subway_Named_Mobius

 

At 5:44 PM,  Josh said...

Numbers is a silly show.

More people need to read Asimov's Foundation series and get to know Hari Seldon.

 

At 12:57 PM,  Brian said...

Lawrence Waterhouse.

 

At 12:18 PM,  MadeleineS said...

Rudy Rucker's work is stuffed full of fictional mathematicians! His 2006 book "Mathematicians in love" features Bela Kis and Paul Bridge, postgrads at Berkeley and a higher world of mathematician cockroaches!

My favourite is a much earlier work "White Light" whose hero, Feliz Raymond, stays in Hilbert's Hotel and visits Cantor's Continum. If he was on the list he'd have got my vote.
See www.rudyrucker.com to find out more

 

At 10:32 AM,  J.Kamesh said...

Griffin and Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde

 

At 1:10 PM,  G. Edgar said...

The Professor in
"The Professor and His Beloved Equation"
2006 movie from Japan
"Hakase no aishita sûshiki"