The magic that magic numbers do is all too often black. They hold special significance for terrestrial mammals with hands and watches, but they mean nothing to streptococcus or the value of Google.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.
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Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.
Against the backdrop that the challenges faced by today’s government agencies and private businesses in Nigeria are many and varied, experts have called on public and private sectors’ managers to adopt operations research as an efficient way of tackling these problems.
According to Akingbade Funsho, president and chairman of council of Institute For Operations Research of Nigeria (INFORN) and former dean of Business and Social Sciences, University of Lagos (UNILAG), operations research is a discipline that can be applied in virtually every area of business and government such as in health care, manufacturing, finance, city planning, judiciary, defence, entertainment, among others.
(via INFORMS)
What they do: An operations research analyst formulates mathematical or simulation models of problems, relating constants and variables, restrictions, alternatives, conflicting objectives, and their numerical parameters.
She has an expressive, alabaster face, a delicate touch — and two wheels where her feet should be.
She is Octavia, a brand new robot designed to improve interactions with humans. And at the annual Fleet Week in New York City, the Navy is bringing its débutante out of the lab.
Just don’t ask her to dance.
My friend Kailas’s robot (sure, it’s the Navy’s robot now, but they bought it from Kailas’s company, Xitome Design) is in the news again.
