In 1939, he resumed his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, studying statistics under mathematician Jerzy Neyman. An incident during his first year at Berkeley became a math-world legend. As Dr. Dantzig recalled years later, he arrived late for class one day and saw two problems on the blackboard that he assumed were homework assignments. He copied them down, took them home and solved them after a few days. "The problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual," he said.

On a Sunday morning six weeks later, an excited Neyman banged on his student's front door, eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.

"That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them," Dr. Dantzig recalled.

via Dantzig Obituary.

iPad 2 shortage has spread to the afterlife as Chinese families in Malaysia rush to buy paper replicas of the popular new gadget to burn for their dead as part of a centuries-old rite.

During the Qingming festival, also known as the tomb sweeping festival, Chinese communities in Asia honor their ancestors by burning fake money or replicas of luxury items such as flashy cars and designer bags.

The festival, which stems from Confucian teachings of loyalty to family and tradition, is also celebrated widely among the Chinese in Malaysia, who make up a quarter of the 28 million people in the mostly Muslim but multicultural country.

"Some of my customers have dreams where their departed relatives will ask for luxury items including the iPad 2," said prayer item shopkeeper Jeffrey Te as he filled cardboard chests with fake money at his shop on the outskirts of the capital.

"I can only offer them the first iPad model," he added, pointing to shelves stocked with the gadget along with paper iPhones and Samsung Galaxy Tabs.

Te shipped in 300 iPad 2 replica sets from China for the Qingming festival, which has just flown off the shelves and left him struggling to meet demand -- a scenario Apple Inc also faces.

In Te's shop, the first and second generation paper iPads sell at a dollar for 888 gigabyte capacity, an auspicious number in Chinese culture. A basic 16 gigabyte iPad for the living costs $499.

For some Chinese, technological gadgets will not be part of the shopping list for their dead relatives.

"They belong to the older generation. If you give all these so-called iPads, they don't know how to use it," said Thomas Soong, 61, as he set fire to a pile of fake money at his grandmother's grave on the fringes of the Malaysian capital.

via Reuters.

THE YOUNG MAN HAD FALLEN OFF A CLIFF WHILE HIKING. Now he was in a coma. His doctors in Stanford’s intensive care unit determined that he had suffered massive, irreversible brain damage and would never make a meaningful recovery. His parents, who knew their son would not have wanted to remain in the zombie-like limbo afforded by a mechanical ventilator, decided to withdraw life support. They also wanted to donate his organs. “It was an incredibly altruistic gesture in the midst of a tragedy,” recalls Carlos Esquivel, MD, PhD, chief of Stanford’s Transplantation Division, of the seven-year-old case.

But Esquivel also recognized that organ donation helps many parents cope with their grief over the loss of a child. So he was upset when David Magnus, PhD, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, arrived at the scene to inform the transplant team that the procedure could not go forward. “It was just the thought that we couldn’t fulfill the parents’ wishes,” Esquivel says.

Magnus, who is occasionally summoned to the hospital to advise doctors on end-of-life issues, including the advisability of organ donation, recalls the scene as “very tense.” At the time, Stanford permitted the removal of organs only from voluntary living donors — a mother donating a kidney to her daughter, for example — and from non-living donors whose deaths were based on the loss of all brain function. But this young man’s brain stem was still active, albeit barely, so donation was not an option.

via Stanford University School of Medicine.

 

 

Her desire for love was insatiable, impossible; she simply asked too much of it.

Of course it was this yearning that permeated her voice and immortalized it. As one collaborator, the lyricist Henri Contet, put it, "Words and music are her beloved slaves. Miraculously they submit because of her passion. She loves them as much as the earth loves rain….She sleeps with her songs, she warms them, she clasps them to her….They possess her." During the triumphant years of her apotheosis she tore the heart out of her listeners...

via The Barnes & Noble Review.

When editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi asked me to write this piece for Communications, my first reaction was the article could be written in two words: Still open.

When I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, many believed that the quickly developing area of circuit complexity would soon settle the P versus NP problem, whether every algorithmic problem with efficiently verifiable solutions have efficiently computable solutions. But circuit complexity and other approaches to the problem have stalled and we have little reason to believe we will see a proof separating P from NP in the near future.

via Communications of the ACM.

this is a must-see.

Were the ancients in the habit of reading silently, or did they normally read out loud? Three weeks ago, discussing certain famous passages in St Augustine's Confessions, I mentioned that St Ambrose's habit of silent reading was clearly unique to him and a novelty to Augustine when he encountered it in Milan. Soon afterwards I received a letter from Myles Burnyeat of All Souls, Oxford. "I fear," says Professor Burnyeat, "you are one of numerous victims of a widespread myth, a serious misreading of Augustine. Since it has been a minor mission in my life to combat this myth, I take the liberty of enclosing two articles designed to set the record straight."

via The Guardian.