American mathematician John Milnor was recently the recipient of the 2011 Abel Prize in mathematics. The Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund was established on January 1, 2002 with the object of creating an “international award for outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics.” The recipient is rewarded almost $1 million from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters which is presented to them by the king of Norway.  Some mathematicians compare the magnitude of this award to something short of winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Abel Prize writes, “John Milnor’s profound ideas and fundamental discoveries have largely shaped the mathematical landscape of the second half of the 20th century. All of Milnor’s work display features of great research: profound insights, vivid imagination, striking surprises and supreme beauty.”  Among his achievements are the many influential books he’s written and the numerous mathematical concepts that have been named after him, such as Milnor fibration and Milnor exotic spheres to name a few.

NPR reporter Robert Siegel recently spoke to math and science writer Julie Rehmeyer on John Milnor’s award and for her help to explain one of Milnor’s most well-known works: the exotic seven-dimensional sphere. Listen below –

(Resources: The Abel Prize, NPR: American Mathematician Wins Abel Prize)

Spring is here. The birds are chirping, the grass is green, and mathematics just revealed to researchers how the ruffled edges of an asiatic lily help it bloom.

Click on the picture to read the full article and watch videos by the research team: "How the Lily Blooms: A Mathematical Perspective

Researchers used observation and experimentation to measure growth and find what growth was imperative for the flower to bloom. Through using a mathematical process they were able to characterize their findings by quantifying, generalizing, and synthesizing their observations. Until recently, it was popular belief that the midrib in each petal caused the flower to bloom, but math revealed the growth and ruffling of the petal edges is what allows the bud to burst into the elegant, curvy flower. Principal investigator L. Mahadevan of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) says, the question of how the lily blooms “is just one more small instance of being inspired by and curious about the natural world around us, a subject that fascinates us all, child and adult alike.”

The fascination and the math doesn’t end with the lily. Mathematicians use fractals to make sense out of seemingly chaotic designs we find in rivers, mountains, clouds, and more. You might have wondered how tiny leaves know where to line-up on the stem of a fern or why a river bends to the right and not the left. The simple answer is nature always takes the most simple and efficient paths. Today many things that were once thought to be chaotic or undefined are now known to have very subtle but present patterns.

Click on the picture to read the full article and see more amazing fractals in nature

But why does it matter that we identify math in nature? According to experts, when we experience something, like the peaks of Mt. Everest, our brains use pattern recognition to let us know what we are seeing. So, what that means is you can leave your calculator at home and let your geometric framework do all the work for you!

Click the video to watch Understanding: Math and Nature

Albert Einstein, the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in physics, was born this week in 1879. He is considered to have had one of the greatest minds of all time. He was educated to teach physics and mathematics but could not find a job in his field, so he accepted a job as a technical assistant in a Swiss patent office. During the days he’d review patents that had been submitted to the office, identifying why each of them would not work. His assignment was to find the fatal flaw in each idea. While this position was not glamourous, and a step down from what he was trained to do, it gave him the opportunity to develop the critical and creative thinking skills to effectively evaluate ideas.

Had Einstein become a professor right out of school, he may have never fine-tuned these evaluation skills. And it was these skills which ultimately led him to discover shortcomings in Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific theories. Einstein’s infamous Theory of Relativity directly evolved from his critical evaluation of Newton’s law of mechanics with the laws of electromagnetic fields. Einstein’s work dramatically affected science and the advancement of technology, from the discovery of the Atom bomb to the development of lasers. Einstein once said that his success was directly related to his ability to evaluate ideas that he developed in the Swiss patent office.

Want to learn more about Einstein? The video below is the first part of a six part series by biography.com. Click here to watch the entire series.

The content for this blog was taken from LifeBound’s book CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING FOR TEENAGERS. In every chapter students will be introduced to a different great thinker from history, as well as a great thinker of today, innovations that changed the world, movers & shakers, and people who think on the cutting edge. To learn more about CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING click here.

As more classrooms shift their focus from teaching to the test to preparing students to be career-ready, teaching lifelong skills — like goal-setting — is becoming popular in some school districts and showing positive results, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. The importance of teaching students how to set goals is evident in the results from last years Gallup Inc. survey:

When Ray Kurzweil was a student at MIT a computer was the size of a room. Now, 40 years later, that same technology can fit on his pocket.  Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist who, among many topics, speaks about the intersection of information technology, education, and human knowledge. Kurzweil is known for being one of the leading inventors of our time for developing:

In 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Act, allowing women to serve as permanent members in the military — but only under certain conditions. It used to be that women weren’t allowed to serve in combat or command men. Also, only two percent of each service could be comprised of women and they would never become generals. This was partly due to the common misperception that by the time women could be considered for an admiral or general officer they would be going through menopause and would therefore make “irrational decisions.”

One woman who paved the way for women in military is retired General Wilma Vaught. In the 1950s, she was expected to have a husband and a child, but her dream was to serve in the military and eventually be in charge. Vaught went through special officers training designed for women to teach them to be “charming” and “attractive” by showing them how to sit and put on makeup.

Then, the Vietnam War brought a status change for women in the military. As the military found that the tens of thousands of men who had been drafted weren’t enough, in 1967 they decided to get rid of the restriction on the amount of women allowed in the military and let the thousands of women volunteers serve – even as general officers.

General Wilma Vaught had almost 30 years of military service and was the first woman to deploy with an Air Force bomber wing. When she retired in 1985, she was one of seven female generals or admirals in all the armed forces. Today, Vaught is the president of the foundation that runs the Women in Military Service for American Memorial in Arlington, Va.

Who is an inspirational woman in your life, personal or famous? Do you know a woman who has broken through the “glass ceiling”? Share your story in the comment box below.

For more information on General Wilma Vaught, visit www.npr.org.

The Kaplan Test Prep’s 2010 survey of college admissions officers shows 82 percent of admissions officers use Facebook as a tool to recruit students. It’s also suspected that searching for the social media presence of a prospective student is used by admissions officers at highly-selective schools to help them make decisions when deciding who to admit from a large pool of candidates. Elements like grades, test scores, and volunteering are still more important to a student’s admission but when it comes down to choosing between students with similar credentials, you don’t want your social media presence to give your competitor the upper-hand. In a thread on the website Quora, an interviewer for Harvard College admissions admitted she occasionally will Google students to see if the presence the student carefully crafted for their admission aligns with their social media presence. She suggests if college and career is important to the student, they do a Google search of their name and pull anything that they wouldn’t want their parents to see.

We’re getting ready to watch the Academy Awards this Sunday and are talking about our favorite nominees. “The Fighter” is an office favorite, nominated for multiple Oscars including Best Picture. For those who haven’t had the chance to see it, the movie shows the early life of boxer Micky Ward working his way up to pro status in the economically drained town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Micky’s half brother Dicky, also a boxer, is Micky’s trainer but proves to be consistently unreliable due to his crack addiction. Dicky agrees to have his daily life as a crack addict captured on film by an HBO camera crew, believing this is his shot at a boxing comeback, but which ultimately casts him in a less-desirable role as a leading man in the documentary “High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.” If you’re interested in learning more about the documentary that’s depicted in “The Fighter” you can watch it in its entirety online, but due to its graphic nature isn’t recommended for young viewers.

While the role of addiction is still in the hollywood spotlight, I am inspired to take this opportunity to share some statistics from a presentation by Pat Wolfe, Ed.D entitled, “The Adolescent Brain and Addiction.”

• The substance dependent brain is physiologically and chemically different rom the normal brain.
• The progression of the disease is influenced by genetic and environmental factors.
• The brain uses natural opiates to reward behaviors that enhance survival and are commonly released by:
  • Food
  • Sex
  • Social Interactions
• Some non-natural opiates (drugs) are so similar to neurotransmitters in their chemical composition that they fit into the receptor sites of the brain’s own opiates.
• When the brain is consistently subjected to artificially high levels of dopamine, the brain starts making less of its own, leaving the user depressed, fatigued, and going into withdrawal unless they relieve it with more of the drug.
• Addictive drugs dramatically blunt neural activity which may lead to poor decision making and problems with impulse control.
• The average age kids start to drink is 12.94 years
• By 12th grade more than 80% of students have consumed alcohol in the past 30 days

Early intervention is key in making sure addicts have a chance at a successful future. Dicky Eklund had a reality check to a degree that many will never get from watching himself as an addict in the HBO documentary and years later in a box office hit. If you know someone who can’t see the addiction, help them yourself or ask for help from someone you trust. To learn more amazing facts about the brain, visit Pat Wolfe’s website www.patwolfe.com