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Fifty Book Challenge 2012
| 7 / 50 (14%) | ||
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This link is an interesting perspective on Little’s Law, L = λW (a fundamental law in queueing theory), which turns 50 this year. (Strictly speaking, it’s the proof of the law that’s turning 50.)
According to the editors of Operations Research:
Little proves that under very general conditions, the average length of a queue, in steady state, will be equal to the arrival rate into the queue times the average wait in the queue. Remarkably, this relationship is not influenced by the arrival process distribution, the service distribution, the service order, or practically anything else. Nor does it depend on the structure of the queueing system: “Little’s Law” holds not just at the individual queue level but also at the system level.
More: John Little’s new paper about his law - “Little’s Law as Viewed on Its 50th Anniversary”
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.
…
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.
It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge.
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
James Dow Allen has a list of “The Fifteen Greatest Mathematicians of All Time” on his site.
While I agree with most of these, I wonder how he neglected Markov and Erlang, though I’m sure he’d argue that they don’t really have the breadth of impact of people like Newton and Gauss.
