This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Hair pulling — Yes, when someone pulls your hair – if you have enough hair that someone can pull it – it hurts. But the truth of why that is, and some of the how much and […]
This medical paper — “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts” — perhaps suggests to you why the headline of this mathematic history paper — “Calculus Under the Coconut Palms: The Last Hurrah of Medieval Indian Mathematics” — may not be quite as accurate as one might desire it to be. Dr. Peter Barss, the author of the injuries […]
The Hairy Ball Theorem (HBT) was first postulated (and then proved) by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer in 1912. An informal statement of the theorem is that : “One cannot comb the hair on a coconut”. Temptations to classify the theorem as trivial should be strongly resisted – as it’s still finding relevance in many current research […]
Knowingly or not, Indian government officials acted in accord with published medical advice when they ordered recently that coconuts be removed from the trees at Mumbai’s Gandhi museum for fear that a nut would descend on to the head of President Obama. Should those officials wish to more fully educate the public, they could distribute […]