Researchers from Brazil's Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation to confirm paleontologist Stephen J. Gould's prediction that it is evolutionarily advantageous for cicadas to emerge at intervals lasting a prime number of years.

Christ, it's depressing how smart one can be in one area while believing the most transparently idiotic things in others (especially when moral culpability is involved). Read THIS COLUMN ("MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used") for yet more evidence concerning the correctness of John Calvin on...

Using 1, 2, and 3, how many numbers can be formed if repetition is not allowed?

Why the recent breakthrough is important Yitang Zhang, of the University of New Hampshire, has apparently proved a finite approximation to the famous Twin Prime Conjecture. This is a result of the first order. After ten days of progressively more detailed news, including today’s article in the New York Times, Zhang’s 56-page preprint has just […]

Vitaly Bergelson, Tamar Ziegler, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our joint paper “Multiple recurrence and convergence results associated to -actions“. This paper is primarily concerned with limit formulae in the theory of multiple recurrence in ergodic theory. Perhaps the most basic formula of this type is the mean ergodic theorem, which (among […]