Monday, May 22, 2017

Eccentric French maths genius's 'scribblings' go online

Nearly 18,000 pages of notes by eccentric French maths genius Alexandre Grothendieck were posted online Wednesday by his alma mater, Montpellier University in southern France.

Grothendieck, who died aged 86 in 2014, "revolutionised an entire area of mathematics, algebraic geometry," said Jean-Michel Marin, head of an institute that bears the mathematician's name at the university.

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Math Champion Wins With Answer About Pecking Chicks

A 13-year-old boy from Texas won a national math competition on Monday with an answer rooted in probabilities — and a dash of farming.

The boy, Luke Robitaille, took less than a second to buzz in at the Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition with the correct answer.

The question: In a barn, 100 chicks sit peacefully in a circle. Suddenly, each chick randomly pecks the chick immediately to its left or right. What is the expected number of unpecked chicks?

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