Slashdot Mirror
Mathematician Solves a Big One After 140 Years
TaeKwonDood notes that ScientificBlogging.com has just written about a development in applied math that was published last year. "The Schwarz-Christoffel transformation is an elegant application of conformal mapping to make complex problems faster to solve. But it didn't do well with irregular geometries or holes, so it simplified too much for a lot of modern-day mechanical engineering applications. 140 years after Schwarz and Christoffel's work, a professor at Imperial College London has generalized the equation. MatLab users rejoice!"
That guy must be pretty old
There is a saying that goes something like "for every new discovery in math, a new field of science begins".
No, it feels like there is the wrong math on Slashdot. What is needed are stories explaning accessible mathematics to a general audience. Not needed are stories about technical advances in mathematics. Two years ago there was a big hoopla about the calculation of the unitary dual of the split real form of $E_8$, which was a more important result and still completely irrelevant to the general public and impossible to explain even in the vaguest terms. There exists blogs by mathematicians where new math results are discussed. Slashdot should find stories which explain ideas of math, and report the occasional genuine breakthrough.
For CS, which is closer to the readership than Math, the bar should be lower. Deterministic poly-time primality testing was reported; a faster matrix multiplication algorithm, or even a faster factorization algorithm should be reported even if the details of the algorithm will not be reportable.