Volume 49 | Number 08 | October 2016
Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Childhood Infectious Disease

Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Childhood Infectious Disease

Epidemic diseases such as measles have an oscillatory behavior closely analogous to predator-prey dynamics in ecology.

Acoustic Boundary-Condition Dynamics and Internally Coupled Ears

Acoustic Boundary-Condition Dynamics and Internally Coupled Ears

More than half of land-living vertebrates are equipped with internally coupled ears, which are essential to survival.

Obituaries: John W. Cahn

Obituaries: John W. Cahn

The mathematics and materials science communities lost a giant when John W. Cahn died of MDS on March 14, 2016.

Mathematics of Simple Olfactory Search

Mathematics of Simple Olfactory Search

Bard Ermentrout presents specific algorithms that allow animals to locate and follow odor sources as dynamical systems.

Donald Knuth Talks Satisfiability and Combinatorics

Donald Knuth Talks Satisfiability and Combinatorics

During the SIAM Annual Meeting, Don Knuth explored the satisfiability of Boolean formulae.

ENIAC: The First Electronic Computer’s Place in History

ENIAC: The First Electronic Computer’s Place in History

Ernest Davis reviews ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, by Thomas Haigh, Mark...

A Bike Wheel and the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem

A Bike Wheel and the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem

Mark Levi asks if a wheel, held by the axle and having zero spin, can turn around the axis and explains a geometric theorem about cones. 

Looking Beyond the Black Box in Optimization

Looking Beyond the Black Box in Optimization

Paul Davis recaps Stefan Wild’s lecture from the AN16 about “black-box” optimization problems.

A Socially Useful Idea of Privacy

A Socially Useful Idea of Privacy

Paul Davis discusses Cynthia Dwork’s work with differential privacy, which she presented during AN16.