Julie Rehmeyer is a freelance math and science writer who writes the Math Trek column at Science News. She also writes frequently for Discover Magazine and Wired. She studied algebraic topology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Voevodsky’s Mathematical Revolution
On last Thursday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Vladimir Voevodsky gave perhaps the most revolutionary scientific talk I’ve ever heard. I doubt if it generated much buzz among the young scientists in advance, though, because it had the inscrutable title “Univalent Foundations of Mathematics,” and the abstract contained sentences like this one: “Set-theoretic approach to foundations [...]
Assuring the integrity of voting using cryptography
American voters have no way of knowing that our votes have been counted, or counted correctly. We go to the polls and we punch buttons on a screen or fill out paper ballots and put them in a box, but we don’t know if the electronic voting machine works correctly, if the ballot box made [...]
The Future Role of Computers in Mathematics
At the end of the forum yesterday afternoon, the mathematics laureates took questions from the audience. One of the questions was about the role of computers in checking and generating proofs.
Making computers smarter, and helping deaf people too
A friend of mine is very hard of hearing — not quite deaf enough to fully belong to the deaf community, but sufficiently deaf that participating in a conversation is terribly hard work for her.
The most unhelpful possible way to prove something
Computer science, I think, gets even more neglected by science journalists than math does. Oh, sure, the next iPhone release gets lots of media attention, but that has little to do with how most computer scientists spend their time, and the general public rarely gets much of a view of the breadth and fascination of [...]
Influential Few Predict Behavior of the Many
A new technique is helping to untangle complexity in systems ranging from metabolism to social networks