Technocrat

Who would do better on your midterms: you or your laptop? Well, your laptop would have instant access to billions of pieces of useful information — the dates of every Civil War battle, the conjugation of the German verb for “to bleach,” the most stable conformational isomer of trans-1-ethyl-2-methylcyclohexane — ...

Voters in British Columbia, when asked on a 2005 ballot whether they supported switching to a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system like the one used in the USG’s U-Council elections, chose not to make the switch.   Though 57.7 percent of voters opted to adopt the STV system, the number ...

"We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung," Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1849. Music professor Dmitri Tymoczko now begs to differ: According to his research, there's an entire world of complex geometric poetry underlying the language of music. Tymoczko, ...

What positive number, spelled out in Scrabble tiles, has a score equal to itself? What seven-letter bingo is a Scrabble player most likely to be holding?These are easy questions for the mathematically minded players who dominate national and international Scrabble tournaments. For the less mathematically inclined, the answers are 12 ...

Imagine this: You’ve dressed in your best, tried hard to impress at a series of interviews, and your future is on the line.  Your first offer is on its way.  Here are the rules:  If you only receive one offer, you must accept it. If you get several, you accept ...