petzoldt:
The “Traveling Sales Man Problem” is a classic in Operations Research. It asked for the shortest round trip through a set of cities given the distances beween them. For 20 cities there are already 2.432.902.008.176.640.000 of such tours. A computer able to calculate a trip length in A computer able to calculate a trip length in one milliseconds would still need 240 billion years checking all of them.
Its fascinating to see how researchers keep pushing the limits when solving ever larger problems using methods from mathematical optimization and Operations Research, such as William Cook who claims to have calculated the best tour visting 1.9 million cities.
A UT Dallas interdisciplinary researcher has launched a human genome analysis project intended to create a mathematical model that improves the efficacy of cancer drugs while reducing their manufacturing costs by as much as 30 percent.
A three-year, $305,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will fund Dr. Mathukumalli “Sagar” Vidyasagar’s development of a new method for detecting DNA sequence similarities.
“What I propose to do is to find mathematical models of how a cross section of cancer patients would react to a particular clinical trial drug,” he said. “If it is likely that an unacceptably high fraction would react adversely, that would allow the developers to kill that program in a timely manner.”
Sagar’s statistical method would reduce the size of the massive databases that store genetic data. With his model, clinicians would be able to sub-sample those databases while still retaining inherent statistical features such as correlations, thus saving time and money without sacrificing accuracy.
This is really interesting. It’s cool to see statistics research in a diverse range of fields, particularly ones such as this that are potentially very beneficial.
Also, “systems biologist” is a really cool title/description.
