Two artists ,Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux, associated with Parachutes, a video production and graphic design studio located in Paris, France, ,have produced a video demonstrating this quote from Bertrand Russell, which is in the opening frame,
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.” — Bertrand Russell
One viewing note, the screen is arranged as a tryptich with the mathematical equation on the left, a schematic in the centre, and the real life manifestation on the right. Enjoy!
Publicizing an unpublished academic paper, which makes the claim that a series of math games, Monkey Tales, are more effective than classroom exercises for teaching maths while trumpeting a series of unsubstantiated statistics, seems a little questionable. The paper featured in a July 8, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily is less like an academic piece and more like an undercover sales document,
To measure the effectiveness of Monkey Tales, a study was carried out with 88 second grade pupils divided into three groups. One group was asked to play the game for a period of three weeks while the second group had to solve similar math exercises on paper and a third group received no assignment. The math performance of the children was measured using an electronic arithmetic test before and after the test period. When results were compared, the children who had played the game provided significantly more correct answers: 6% more than before, compared to only 4% for the group that made traditional exercises and 2% for the control group. In addition, both the group that played the game and that which did the exercises were able to solve the test 30% faster while the group without assignment was only 10% faster.
Ordinarily, this excerpt wouldn’t be a big problem since one would have the opportunity to read the paper and analyse the methodology by asking questions such as this, how were the students chosen? Were the students with higher grades given the game? There’s another issue, percentages can be misleading when one doesn’t have the numbers, e.g., if there’s an increase from one to two, it’s perfectly valid to claim a 100% increase even if it is misleading. Finally, how were they able to measure speed? The control group, i.e., group without assignment, was 10% faster than whom?
The University of Ghent July 8, 2013 news release, which originated the news item, also includes a business case in what is supposed to be a news release about a study on maths education,
Serious or educational games are becoming increasingly important. Market research company iDate estimates that the global turnover was €2.3 billion in 2012 and expects it to rise to €6.6 billion in 2015.* A first important sector in which serious games are being used, is defence. The U.S. Army, for example, uses games to attract recruits and to teach various skills, from tactical combat training to ways of communicating with local people. Serious games are also increasingly used in companies and organizations to train staff. The Flemish company U&I Learning, for example, developed games for Audi in Vorst to teach personnel the safety instructions, for Carrefour to teach student employees how to operate the check-out system and for DHL to optimise the loading and unloading of air freight containers.
Reservations about the study aside, Monkey Tales (for PC only) looks quite charming.
[downloaded from http://www.monkeytalesgames.com/demo.php]
In addition to a demo which can be downloaded, the site’s FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) provides some information about the games’ backers and the games,
Who created Monkey Tales?
Developed by European schoolbook publisher Die Keure and award winning game developer Larian Studios, Monkey Tales is based on years of research and was developed with the active participation of teachers, schools, universities and educational method-makers.
What does years of research mean ?
Exactly that. The technology behind Monkey Tales has been in development for over 4 years, and has been field tested with over 30 000 children and across several schools, with very active engagement from both teachers and educational method-makers. Additionally, a two years research project is underway in which the universities of Ghent & Leuven are participating to measure the efficiency of the methods used within Monkey Tales.
What is the educational goal behind Monkey Tales?
Monkey Tales’ aim is not to instruct, that’s what teachers and schools are for. Instead it aims to help children rehearse and improve skills they should have, by motivating them to do drill exercises with increasing time pressure.
Because the abilities of children are very diverse, the algorithm behind the game first tries to establish where a child is on the learning curve, and then stimulates the child to make progress. This way frustration is avoided, and the child makes progress without realizing that it’s being pushed forward.
There’s a demonstrable effect that playing the game helps mastery of arithmetic. Parents can experience this themselves by trying out the games.
What can my child learn from Monkey Tales?
Currently there are five games available, covering grades 2 to 6, covering the field of mathematics in line with state standards (Common Core Standards and the 2009 DoDEA standards). Future games in the series will cover language and science.
What’s special about Monkey Tales?
A key feature of Monkey Tales is its unique algorithm that allows the game to automatically adapt to the level of children so that they feel comfortable with their ability to complete the exercises, removing any stress they might feel. From there, the game then presents progressively more difficult exercises, all the time monitoring how the child is performing and adapting if necessary. One of the most remarkable achievements of Monkey Tales is its ability to put children under time pressure to complete exercises without them complaining about it!
Hopefully this Monkey Tales study or a new study will be published and a news release, which by its nature, offers skimpy information won’t provoke any doubts about the validity of the work.
“We find positive and substantial longer-run impacts of double-dose algebra on college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates and college enrollment rates, suggesting that the policy had significant benefits that were not easily observable in the first couple of years of its existence,” wrote the article’s authors.
The Mar. 21, 2013 news release on EurekAlert which includes the preceding quote recounts an extraordinary story about an approach to teaching algebra that was not enthusiastically adopted at first but first some reason administrators and teachers persisted with it. Chelsey Leu’s Mar. 21, 2013 article (which originated the news release) for UChicago (University of Chicago) News (Note: Links have been removed),
Martin Gartzman sat in his dentist’s waiting room last fall when he read a study in Education Next that nearly brought him to tears.
A decade ago, in his former position as chief math and science officer for Chicago Public Schools [CPS], Gartzman spearheaded an attempt to decrease ninth-grade algebra failure rates, an issue he calls “an incredibly vexing problem.” His idea was to provide extra time for struggling students by having them take two consecutive periods of algebra.
…
In high schools, ninth-grade algebra is typically the class with the highest failure rate. This presents a barrier to graduation, because high schools usually require three to four years of math to graduate.
Students have about a 20 percent chance of passing the next math level if they don’t first pass algebra, Gartzman said, versus 80 percent for those who do pass. The data are clear: If students fail ninth-grade algebra, the likelihood of passing later years of math, and ultimately of graduating, is slim
…
Gartzman’s work to decrease algebra failure rates at CPS was motivated by a study of Melissa Roderick, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at UChicago’s School of Social Service Administration. The study emphasized the importance of keeping students academically on track in their freshman year to increase the graduation rate.
Some administrators and teachers resisted the new policy. Teachers called these sessions “double-period hell” because they gathered, in one class, the most unmotivated students who had the biggest problems with math.
Principals and counselors sometimes saw the double periods as punishment for the students, depriving them of courses they may have enjoyed taking and replacing them with courses they disliked.
It seemed to Gartzman that double-period students were learning more math, though he had no supporting data. He gauged students’ progress by class grades, not by standardized tests. The CPS educators had no way of fully assessing their double-period idea. All they knew was that failure rates didn’t budge.
Unfortunately, Leu does not explain why the administrators and teachers continued with the program but it’s a good thing they did (Note: Links have been removed),
“Double-dosing had an immediate impact on student performance in algebra, increasing the proportion of students earning at least a B by 9.4 percentage points, or more than 65 percent,” noted the Education Next article. Although ninth-grade algebra passing rates remained mostly unaffected, “The mean GPA across all math courses taken after freshman year increased by 0.14 grade points on a 4.0 scale.”
They also found significantly increased graduation rates. The researchers concluded on an encouraging note: “Although the intervention was not particularly effective for the average affected student, the fact that it improved high school graduation and college enrollment rates for even a subset of low-performing and at-risk students is extraordinarily promising when targeted at the appropriate students.” [emphasis mine]
Gartzman recalled that reading the article “was mind-blowing for me. I had no idea that the researchers were continuing to study these kids.”
The study had followed a set of students from eighth grade through graduation, while Gartzman’s team could only follow them for a year after the program began. The improvements appeared five years after launching double-dose algebra, hiding them from the CPS team, which had focused on short-term student performance. [emphasis mine]
Gartzman stressed the importance of education policy research. “Nomi and Allensworth did some really sophisticated modeling that only researchers could do, that school districts really can’t do. It validates school districts all over the country who had been investing in double-period strategies.”
I’m not sure I understand the numbers very well (maybe I need a double-dose of numbers). The 9.4% increase for students earning a B sounds good but a mean increase of 0.14 in grade points doesn’t sound as impressive. As for the bit about the program being “not particularly effective for the average affected student,” what kind of student is helped by this program? As for the improvements being seen five years after the program launch. does this mean that students in the program showed improvement five years later (in first year university) or that researchers weren’t able to effectively measure any impact in the grade nine classroom until five years after the program began?
Regardless, it seems there is an improvement and having suffered through my share algebra classes, I applaud the educators for finding a way to help some students, if not all.
1920, the year mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan died, is also the year he left behind mathematical formulas that may help unlock the secrets of black holes (from the Dec. 11, 2012 posting by Carol Clark for Emory University’s e-science commons blog),
“No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them,” Ono [Emory University mathematician Ken Ono] says.
Expansion of modular forms is one of the fundamental tools for computing the entropy of a modular black hole. Some black holes, however, are not modular, but the new formula based on Ramanujan’s vision may allow physicists to compute their entropy as though they were.
Ramanujan was on his death bed (at the age of 32) when he devised his last formulas (from the Clark posting),
Accessed from http://esciencecommons.blogspot.ca/2012/12/math-formula-gives-new-glimpse-into.html
… A devout Hindu, Ramanujan said that his findings were divine, revealed to him in dreams by the goddess Namagiri.
…
While on his death-bed in 1920, Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The letter described several new functions that behaved differently from known theta functions, or modular forms, and yet closely mimicked them. Ramanujan conjectured that his mock modular forms corresponded to the ordinary modular forms earlier identified by Carl Jacobi, and that both would wind up with similar outputs for roots of 1.
No one at the time understood what Ramanujan was talking about. “It wasn’t until 2002, through the work of Sander Zwegers, that we had a description of the functions that Ramanujan was writing about in 1920,” Ono says.
This year (2012) a number of special events have been held to commemorate Ramanujan’s accomplishments (Note: I have removed links), from the Clark posting,
December 22 [2012] marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician renowned for somehow intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without the use of proofs or modern mathematical tools. ..
“I wanted to do something special, in the spirit of Ramanujan, to mark the anniversary,” says Emory mathematician Ken Ono. “It’s fascinating to me to explore his writings and imagine how his brain may have worked. It’s like being a mathematical anthropologist.”
Ono, a number theorist whose work has previously uncovered hidden meanings in the notebooks of Ramanujan, set to work on the 125th-anniversary project with two colleagues and former students: Amanda Folsom, from Yale, and Rob Rhoades, from Stanford.
The result is a formula for mock modular forms that may prove useful to physicists who study black holes. The work, which Ono recently presented at the Ramanujan 125 conference at the University of Florida, also solves one of the greatest puzzles left behind by the enigmatic Indian genius.
Here’s a trailer for the forthcoming movie (a docu-drama) about Ramanujan, from the Clark posting,
Here’s a description of Ramanujan from Wikipedia, which gives some insight into the nature of his genius (Note: I have removed links and a footnote),
Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS (…) (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Living in India with no access to the larger mathematical community, which was centered in Europe at the time, Ramanujan developed his own mathematical research in isolation. As a result, he sometimes rediscovered known theorems in addition to producing new work. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius by the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, in the same league as mathematicians like Euler and Gauss.
There is a little more to Ono’s latest work concerning Ramanujan’s deathbed math functions (from the Clark posting),
After coming up with the formula for computing a mock modular form, Ono wanted to put some icing on the cake for the 125th-anniversary celebration. He and Emory graduate students Michael Griffin and Larry Rolen revisited the paragraph in Ramanujan’s last letter that gave a vague description for how he arrived at the functions. That one paragraph has inspired hundreds of papers by mathematicians, who have pondered its hidden meaning for eight decades.
“So much of what Ramanujan offers comes from mysterious words and strange formulas that seem to defy mathematical sense,” Ono says. “Although we had a definition from 2002 for Ramanujan’s functions, it was still unclear how it related to Ramanujan’s awkward and imprecise definition.”
Ono and his students finally saw the meaning behind the puzzling paragraph, and a way to link it to the modern definition. “We developed a theorem that shows that the bizarre methodology he used to construct his examples is correct,” Ono says. “For the first time, we can prove that the exotic functions that Ramanujan conjured in his death-bed letter behave exactly as he said they would, in every case.”
Ono is now on a mathematicians’ tour in India (from the Clark posting),
Ono will spend much of December in India, taking overnight trains to Mysore, Bangalore, Chennai and New Dehli, as part of a group of distinguished mathematicians giving talks about Ramanujan in the lead-up to the anniversary date.
“Ramanujan is a hero in India so it’s kind of like a math rock tour,” Ono says, adding, “I’m his biggest fan. My professional life is inescapably intertwined with Ramanujan. Many of the mathematical objects that I think about so profoundly were anticipated by him. I’m so glad that he existed.”
Between this and the series developed by Alex Bellos about mathematics in Japan (my Oct. 17, 2012 posting), it seems that attention is turning eastward where the study and development of mathematics is concerned. H/T to EurekAlert’s Dec. 17, 2012 news release and do read Clark’s article if you want more information about Ono and Ramanujan.
The New Science gives you control of one of five legendary geniuses from the scientific revolution in a race to research, successfully experiment on, and finally publish some of the critical early advances that shaped modern science.
This fun, fast, easy-to-learn worker placement game for 2-5 players is ideal for casual and serious gamers alike. The rules are easy to learn and teach, but the many layers of shifting strategy make each game a new challenge that tests your mind and gets your competitive juices flowing.
Each scientist has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. No two scientists play the same way, so each time you try someone new it provides a different and satisfying play experience. Your scientist’s mat also serves as a player aid, repeating all of the key technology information from the game board for your easy reference.
The “five legendary geniuses’ are Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Liebniz, and Athanasius Kircher. The Kickstarter campaign to take control of the five has raised $5,058 US of the $16,000 requested and it ends on Oct. 17, 2012.
The game is listed on boardgamegeek.com with additional details such as this,
Designer: Dirk Knemeyer
Artist: Heiko Günther
Publisher: Conquistador Games
# of players: 2-5
User suggested ages: 12 and up
Description:
Players control one of the great scientists during the 17th century Scientific Revolution in Europe. Use your limited time and energy to make discoveries, test hypotheses, publish papers, correspond with other famous scientists, hire assistants into your laboratory and network with other people who can help your progress. ’emphasis mine] Discoveries follow historical tech trees in the key sciences of the age: Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The scientist who accumulates the most prestige will be appointed the first President of the Royal Society.
The activities listed in the game description “make discoveries, test hypotheses,” etc. must sound very familiar to a contemporary scientist.
There’s also an explanatory video as seen on the Kickstarter campaign page and embedded here below,
David notes this about game quality in his Sept. 16, 2012 posting (Note: I have removed a link),
The game was heavily tested by the folks at Game Salute, and comes with the kind of quality details you might expect from games like Ticket to Ride or the various version of Catan. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the game, it will run $49 U.S., plus shipping for destinations outside the U.S. See the Kickstarter page for more details.
Mathematics as a performing art (music, dance, and theatre) and all of it framed with stunning set designs incorporating MC Escher’s art, fractals, and other mathematically-based visual art demonstrates how pervasive mathematics is throughout society both now and in the past.
Following up on its December 2011 première, Math Out Loud is about to embark on a Fall 2012 tour. From the Tour webpage on the Math Out Loud website,
Experience Math Out Loud, an acclaimed, trailblazing stage production featuring a superb cast, original music, choreography, animations and a high tech set. This fall, Math Out Loud will tour three cities [Vancouver, Sidney, and Surrey] in British Columbia with weekday performances for schools and weekend matinees for the general public. The 75 minute show combines mathy ideas and musical comedy and is intended for audiences ages 13 and up. Parents, join your kids in a learning experience that is fun for all.
The school shows are free . In Vancouver, school shows run from Sept. 24 – 28, 2012 (three of the shows are fully booked) and shows for the public are scheduled for Sept. 29, 2012. All of the Vancouver shows are being held at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in the Jewish Community Centre at 41st and Oak St.
In Sidney, the school shows run from Oct. 1 – 5, 2012 and the shows for the public are Oct. 6, 2012. All the shows are being held at the Charlie White Theatre located in the Mary Winspear Centre at 2243 Beacon Avenue.
In Surrey, the school shows run from Oct. 23 – 26, 2012 and the shows for the public are Oct. 27 – 28, 2012. All the shows are being held at the Surrey Arts Centre (SAC mainstage) at 13750 88th Avenue.
You can find out more about the show (there’s a 15 min. video) and book your school class or buy a ticket for the Fall 2012 tour at the Math Out Loud website.
I first mentioned this math musical which is being produced by MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems, a not-for-profit research organization) in my Jan. 9, 2012 posting.
The Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST) will be holding a free ‘pop up’ event at Joey’s on Broadway (1424 W. Broadway at Hemlock St.) on Friday, July 27, 2012 from 6 pm – 8 pm.This event is a local outcome of the international discussion taking place about the European Commissions’ Science: It’s a Girl Thing campaign video (first mentioned in my July 6, 2012 posting and then in my July 18, 2012 posting).
Here’s more about the Vancouver topic and the event (from the July 20, 2012 posting on the Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology (WWEST) blog on the University of British Columbia website),
Topic: It’s a girl thing: How do we get more girls to pursue STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] careers?
What is a SCWIST Pop-Up Discussion? A casual evening of networking, socializing, and discussion on current and relevant media topics held at a local restaurant! It’s a chance to get out and chat and network with like-minded people!
Mathematics professor at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Graeme Pettet provides a fascinating perspective on skin and bone, from the April 23, 2012 news item by Alita Pashley on physorg.com,
Professor Graeme Pettet, a mathematician from QUT’s Institute of Health Biomedical Innovation (IHBI), said maths could be used to better understand the structure of skin and bones and their response to healing techniques, which will eventually lead to better therapeutic innovations.
“Mathematics is the language of any science so if there are spatial or temporal variations of any kind then you can describe it mathematically,” he said.
…
“Skin is very difficult to describe. It’s very messy and very complicated. In fact most of the descriptions that engineers and biologists use are schematic stories (diagrams),” he said.
“Once we understand the structure (of the skin) and how it develops we can begin to analyze how that development impacts upon healing in the skin and maybe also diseases of the skin.”
Professor Pettet said his research would, for the first time, formalise the theories about the way cells interact when healing.
…
Professor Pettet is also working on applying similar techniques to figure out how to show how small, localised damage at the site of bone fractures can impact on healing.
The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is opening its virtual doors to the scientific community. I think Nassif Ghoussoub in his April 3, 2012 posting on his Piece of Mind blog says it better,
The Banff International Research Station (BIRS) has announced that its new physical meeting space at the beautiful TransCanada Pipelines Pavilion in Banff Canada, is now accessible to the scientific community in virtual space, via live video streaming and high quality video recordings, produced by a state-of-the-art automated video production system. This is a first step in our collaborative effort with the Mprime network and the other mathematical sciences institutes, towards building and coordinating a national Internet infrastructure supporting mathematical research and education, including a unified video capture, video streaming, video archiving, and video storage service for the world’s mathematical science community.
I last mentioned BIRS in my Jan. 9, 2012 posting (scroll down about 1/2 way) in the context of a mathematics workshop held there for poets.
Here’s more from Nassif about the virtual network,
Further into the future, we would like to add some interactive features that allow remote parties to participate in workshops. Sophisticated video conferencing integration has been part of the plan from the beginning, and remains a priority.…
BIRS alone will be broadcasting 25-30 lectures per week for 49 weeks of every year. Each lecture has the potential to open up new threads for research. Future authors working with these ideas will be empowered to provide precise citations to video archives of lectures inspiring their research. The citations to video lectures that appear in subsequent publications will contribute to a biblio-metric metadata stream demonstrating research impact. BIRS will be collaborating with the other institutes to define a unified video capture, video streaming, video archiving, and video storage service for all interested mathematical institutions.
In the meantime, you can find the latest lectures and notices about upcoming events here. Not all of these lectures will be livestreamed and/or recorded as the speaker must make the choice of pressing the ‘webcast’ button.
In January of 2012, BIRS installed a system of cameras, microphones, and automation technology in it’s main lecture room in order to fully automate the production, recording, broadcasting, and distribution of high-quality lecture videos. An overview of how it works is posted here. Since then, we have been busy writing software, adding features, and tweaking the behaviour of the system. As a work in progress, you should expect the occasional hiccup. We would love to hear your feedback or suggestions, since we are building this for the benefit of the community and consider it a collaborative effort.
I would like to extend a huge thank-you to all of the participants at BIRS who, in choosing to record — and now broadcast — their lectures online, provide a valuable resource, contributing to educational and scientific progress.
Brent Kearney
Technology Manager for BIRS
…
System Requirements
The live stream should work on any modern computer or mobile device that supports Flash or HTML5 streaming video. It has been casually tested and works with Microsoft Windows IE 8 and 9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iPhones, iPads, Playbooks, and some Android phones. Please let us know if it does not work on your device.
The live video uses dynamic streaming to automatically scale the video quality up or down based on your connection speed. Switching to fullscreen mode, or attempting to advance the play position, will force a re-evaluation of your bandwidth constraints. In it’s highest mode, the stream displays 1920×720 resolution HD video at 1800kbps and 30fps. In its lowest mode, it plays in most mobile devices at 320×180 resolution at 400kbps and 24fps. There are two modes in between.
Very exciting stuff. I think it would be wonderful if those plans to include interactivity happened to coincide with the next Canadian Science Policy Conference. BTW, despite what I wrote in my Feb. 20, 2012 posting (scroll down 2/3 of the way) about an imminent announcement, the location for the 2012 conference has not yet been divulged.
I pricked up my ears when I saw the word ‘analogy’. As a writer, I tend to be quite interested in analogies and metaphors, especially as they relate to science. I certainly never expected to find an analogy established by mathematical rigour—it never occurred to the poet in my soul. Thankfully, mathematicians at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were not constrained by my lack of imagination. From the Dec. 8, 2011 news item written by Denise Brehm on Nanowerk,
Using a new mathematical methodology, researchers at MIT have created a scientifically rigorous analogy that shows the similarities between the physical structure of spider silk and the sonic structure of a melody, proving that the structure of each relates to its function in an equivalent way.
The step-by-step comparison begins with the primary building blocks of each item — an amino acid and a sound wave — and moves up to the level of a beta sheet nanocomposite (the secondary structure of a protein consisting of repeated hierarchical patterns) and a musical riff (a repeated pattern of notes or chords). The study explains that structural patterns are directly related to the functional properties of lightweight strength in the spider silk and, in the riff, sonic tension that creates an emotional response in the listener.
While likening spider silk to musical composition may appear to be more novelty than breakthrough, the methodology behind it represents a new approach to comparing research findings from disparate scientific fields. Such analogies could help engineers develop materials that make use of the repeating patterns of simple building blocks found in many biological materials that, like spider silk, are lightweight yet extremely failure-resistant. The work also suggests that engineers may be able to gain new insights into biological systems through the study of the structure-function relationships found in music and other art forms.
The MIT researchers — David Spivak, a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics, Associate Professor Markus Buehler of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and CEE graduate student Tristan Giesa — published their findings in the December issue of BioNanoScience.
Here’s part of how they developed the analogy between spider silk and music using mathematics (from the MIT news release),
They created the analogy using ontology logs, or “ologs,” a concept introduced about a year ago by Spivak, who specializes in a branch of mathematics called category theory. Ologs provide an abstract means for categorizing the general properties of a system — be it a material, mathematical concept or phenomenon — and showing inherent relationships between function and structure.
To build the ologs, the researchers used information from Buehler’s previous studies of the nanostructure of spider silk and other biological materials.
“There is mounting evidence that similar patterns of material features at the nanoscale, such as clusters of hydrogen bonds or hierarchical structures, govern the behavior of materials in the natural environment, yet we couldn’t mathematically show the analogy between different materials,” Buehler says. “The olog lets us compile information about how materials function in a mathematically rigorous way and identify those patterns that are universal to a very broad class of materials. Its potential for engineering the built environment — in the design of new materials, structures or infrastructure — is immense.”
“This work is very exciting because it brings forth an approach founded on category theory to bridge music (and potentially other aspects of the fine arts) to a new field of materiomics,” says Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Joyce Wong of Boston University, a biomaterials scientist and engineer, as well as a musician. “This approach is particularly appropriate for the hierarchical design of proteins, as they show in the silk example. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to reveal new relationships between seemingly disparate fields with the aim of improving materials engineering and design.”
I always like to have a visual,
Graphic: Christine Daniloff
You can get more details from either the Nanowerk website or the MIT website.
Since it’s a Friday I thought I’d include a video of a song about spiderwebs and found this on YouTube,
![[downloaded from http://www.monkeytalesgames.com/demo.php]](http://www.frogheart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/MonkeyTales.jpg)
