The need for consumers to sustain a permanent connection has been driven by a deep-seated need, fueled by peers, the furor of social media and just simply a trend to have immediate access to anything at anytime, anywhere.  As consumers, we all crave a perpetual connection to the Internet.  Personally, I am at a total loss if I’m deprived of my daily IP-fix.  I think I can confidently speculate that we all have a deep-seated need to be connected.  The availability of Wi-Fi in bars, shops, restaurants and so on, along with favorable data packages offered by both fixed and cellular providers has allowed us all to sustain that all-important ‘IP-fix’.

The Lawnmower Man Effect (LME) represents the consumers ability to traverse digital systems across the globe, all Captained from their personal area networking space utilizing pervasive WAN technologies.

—Dr. Dean Anthony Gratton, The Handbook of Personal Area Networking Technologies and Protocols, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Figure 1: The Lawnmower Man Effect typifies the consumers’ ability to traverse digital systems across the globe, all Captained from their personal area network through pervasive WAN technologies.

I have penned the Lawnmower Man Effect (LME) as a definition; a term that classifies the ability afforded to a new generation of consumers who seek to have that permanent connection to anything, at anytime, anywhere.  A generation of consumers who are nowadays armed with a myriad of electronic devices that have an inherent ability to connect.  In Figure 1, I conceptualize the LME supposition where we, as individuals, have this unique ability to virtually cross the globe in an instant.  I derived the term from the 1992 film starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, The Lawnmower Man.  In the film we witness Brosnan conducting numerous experiments on Fahey using virtual reality in an attempt to increase his intelligence but, of course, this is not the focus of my definition here.  Rather, despite the character’s malevolent motivation, Fahey physically becomes holistic within the wider area network, having an ability to traverse computers, technology and telephony systems and a range of other digital applications and services across the globe.  Essentially, the Lawnmower Man Effect typifies the modern consumers’ ability to likewise traverse similar systems across the globe, whether sat at a computer, waiting for a train or cheering at a sporting event; hopefully void of the malevolence portrayed in the movie and all Captained from their personal area network.  What’s more, LME is a supposition that consumers, irrespective of their location and despite their conceptual boundaries, are all connected to this one-network – if you like, one IP-enabled global community, where each consumer has every opportunity to remain connected, no matter where they are in the world.  Nowadays, immediacy of content and access, and perhaps social media is also responsible for this need to be ever-present.  In a society that often demands, “We want it now” it seems we can no-longer wait for that all important email; tweet, Facebook or Google+ message.  Indeed, there are some who are eager to oust their colleague to become Mayor of a popular establishment on Foursquare.  The vibrant shift in communication through social media has given rise to a new revolution of fresh knowledge and curation – all supported by a culture through virtual communities mapped across our virtual space.  No matter where new technology leads us, we are holistically connected in our virtual community, connecting with other like-minded people across the global, indirectly supported by the Lawnmower Man Effect.

Dr Dean Anthony Gratton is a bestselling author and columnist. Dean has worked extensively within the wireless communications R&D industry and has an accomplished career in software engineering. He was an Editor of the Specification of the Bluetooth System: Profiles, v1.1 and participated in defining the initial Bluetooth Personal Area Networking profiles. He was also active in the NFC technology and marketing committees. Dean is a contributor to several industry periodicals, where he has written many contentious articles sharing his thoughts and challenges on wireless industry news, opinions and gossip.

Named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, the award has been given annually since 1966 to those who have made lasting and major contributions to the field of computer science.

Former Turing Award winner and current chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration likened Pearl to the award’s namesake and credited him with ”constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence” and providing “theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence” that led to “extraordinary achievements in machine learning.”

Alfred Spector of Google, which helps fund the award, said “Modern applications of artificial intelligence, such as robotics, self-driving cars, speech recognition, and machine translation deal with uncertainty. Pearl has been instrumental in supplying the rationale and valuable technology that allow these applications to flourish, and his clear and persuasive speaking and writing convinced the vast majority of the field to adopt new techniques.”

Pearl’s groundbreaking book, Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, has been recognized by the ACM as among the single most influential works in shaping the theory and practice of knowledge-based systems.

Speaking on Pearl’s win, Editorial Director of Mathematical Sciences David Tranah said “[the] award is especially appropriate for Cambridge as a whole. It’s the centenary of the birth of Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing; and a lot of Pearl’s work is in direct descent from Turing’s own contributions. People like this really do change the world and we are proud to be their publisher” while Senior Mathematics and Computer Science editor Lauren Cowles commented “this couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

Pearl will accept the 2011 A.M. Turing Award at ACM’s annual Awards Banquet in San Francisco. The 2012 ACM Turing Centenary Celebration takes place on June 15-16, immediately preceding the ACM Awards Banquet.

To commemorate the centenary, Cambridge is set to republish Alan M. Turing, Sarah Turing’s original biography enriched by a new foreword by mathematician Martin Davis and a never-before-published memoir by Alan’s older brother.

The Principia Mathematica is the most famous work ever published on the foundations of mathematics. Written by British mathematicians and philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, it was published by Cambridge in three volumes in 1910, 1912, and 1913. A second edition was published in 1927.

Principia attempted to ground mathematics in logic and the authors left no stone unturned in their attempt to create the ultimate definition of mathematics. For example, they were well into volume two before they had proved that one plus one equals two! They concluded their proofs with the laconic statement: “The above proposition is occasionally useful.” 

The Principia covered real, cardinal and ordinal numbers and set theory. A fourth volume on the foundations of geometry had been planned, but the authors declared themselves intellectually exhausted on completing the third. 

Julie Rehmeyer writes about mathematics for Wired Magazine and Science News. She commented thatPrincipia has been hugely influential, but in an unexpected way: 

“The book kind of laid the seeds for its own undoing. About 20 years later, a German mathematician named Kurt Godel used what Russell and Whitehead had done in the Principia to show that it actually couldn’t do what it aimed to do, that it couldn’t contain all of math, that there would be true mathematical statements that were not logical consequences of the axioms that it set out. 

So the interesting thing about it is, on the one hand, it kind of destroyed the whole project, and on the other hand, Godel couldn’t have come to that conclusion without the work of the Principia.” 

The book represented not only a tour de force in writing, but also in typesetting, as whole new alphabets had to be created. Arguably, the greatest achievement of Principiawas to lay the foundations for modern computing by essentially turning mathematics into code – the type of coding ultimately employed to build computers. 

Principia Mathematica is still available from the Press and in August this year, Cambridge will publish The Evolution of Principia Mathematica – Bertrand Russell’s Manuscripts and Notes for the Second Edition by Bernard Linsky, drawing on archive material held by the McMaster University of Canada. 

Russell and Whitehead’s work was not, of course, Cambridge’s first revolutionary Principia Mathematica. In 1713 the Press published the second edition of Newton’sPrincipia (full title Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), which became one of the most influential and famous books in the history of science.

Transcript reposted from NPR.org

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

One hundred years ago this month, Cambridge University Press in England published a book that lost money, that according to one of its two co-authors was probably read in full by only six people, but that influenced the thinking of people who influenced the thinking of other people, who influenced the thinking of still others, and so on and so forth.

It was volume one of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica.” Two more volumes of the work would follow.

I am deeply in over my head in these mathematical and philosophical waters, but Im hoping that Julie Rehmeyer can swim through them a bit. She writes about math for Science News and for Wired. And she joins us now from Berkeley, California. Welcome to the program once again.

Ms. JULIE REHMEYER (Science Writer, ScienceNews.org and “Wired” Magazine): Thank you, delighted to be here.

SIEGEL: And first, describe for us what Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were trying to show in this book that in 1910.

Ms. REHMEYER: They were really trying to rescue math from a deep crisis of foundations. Mathematicians had found some surprising results that led them to realize they needed to be a whole lot more careful than they had been previously.

So, Russell and Whitehead set out to show that math really boiled down to logic and to define at the very most basic level what mathematics was, and to show then that all of math was logical consequences from some very, very simple principles.

SIEGEL: Even if the math they were describing involved things that we didn’t see in everyday life and that seemed to…

Ms. REHMEYER: That’s exactly right.

SIEGEL: …violate common sense.

Ms. REHMEYER: That’s exactly right. And in particular, what mathematicians had found that they were responding to was that they had discovered non-Euclidean geometries, which are kind of whole different universes of geometry that are mathematically consistent but utterly non-intuitive and not at all what we experienced in the everyday world.

SIEGEL: Where two parallel lines might in fact meet at some point.

Ms. REHMEYER: Well, one version is where two parallel lines might in fact meet, and another version is where there are lots of different parallel lines through one point.

SIEGEL: That is a measure of their rigor that Ive read, which is how long it took them in this work to prove that one plus one equals two.

Ms. REHMEYER: Indeed. It took them well into Volume 2.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. REHMEYER: Eighty pages into Volume 2. And when they proved it, they have this wonderful little note after it that says: The above proposition is occasionally useful.

(Soundbite of laughter)

SIEGEL: Now, how influential was this work, or was it simply a big deal for 1910 and subsequent years but forgotten long after?

Ms. REHMEYER: Well, it certainly has not been forgotten. It’s been very influential. But the interesting thing is it’s been influential in a kind of unexpected and, in some ways, sort of tragic way.

The book kind of laid the seeds for its own undoing. About 20 years later, a German mathematician named Kurt Godel used what Russell and Whitehead had done in the Principia to show that it actually couldn’t do what it aimed to do, that it couldn’t contain all of math, that there would be true mathematical statements that were not logical consequences of the axioms that it set out.

And that really, it was completely shocking, and it completely transformed our understanding of what math fundamentally is.

So the interesting thing about it is, on the one hand, it kind of destroyed the whole project, and on the other hand, Godel couldn’t have come to that conclusion without the work of the Principia. So it kind of ate its own tail in a funny way.

And in a certain way, at this point, one of the biggest contributions of the book is that it laid the groundwork for computation, even though that was not in Russell or Whitehead’s mind at all. Computers had barely been conceived of at that point.

CONAN: But you mean the project of writing code for computers?

Ms. REHMEYER: That’s exactly right because the Principia is getting rid of all of the ambiguities of natural language, you know, English language. And part of the reason that so few people have read is that it’s almost all symbols. It’s really almost impossible to read. It’s like sitting down and reading a computer program.

So that process of turning mathematics essentially into code is exactly what ultimately needs to be done to build computers. And it had a huge influence on the design of computers that lasts till this day.

SIEGEL: For us baby boomers who remember Bertrand Russell as largely a political dissident of the 1950s, this is actually what he was famous for, is a mathematician, yes?

Ms. REHMEYER: Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Though, you know, his political work I think grew out of his mathematical views in many ways. He saw logic as being fundamental to everything, and his political beliefs I think grew out of that in many ways.

SIEGEL: Thank you, Julie.

Ms. REHMEYER: Thank you. This was fun.

SIEGEL: Julie Rehmeyer writes about mathematics for Wired Magazine and Science News. She spoke to us from Berkeley, California.

– Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner had no formal mathematical training. A newspaper reporter, publicist, freelancer for Esquire, caseworker, magician, skeptic, Navy sailor, and most famously, “Mathematical Games” columnist for Scientific American, Gardner displayed a boundless energy and enthusiasm for intellectual inquiry. A tireless advocate for science, his popular books and articles painstakingly argue against the dangers of pseudoscience in all forms.

On Saturday, Gardner passed away at the age of 95 in Norman, OK. He will be remembered for his prolific writing, wide-ranging interests, unquenchable curiosity, and infectious enthusiasm for the odder side of math. A writer first, Gardner’s triumph was in bringing the delight of discovery to his readers. Inquisitive and sharply analytic, he researched everything from origami and variations on tic-tac-toe to card tricks, probability, and his famous brain teasers – “an orgy of right-brain tomfoolery that could be approached for superficial fun or deep insight, or both at the same time…” – David Brooks, The Telegraph.

——–

Thank for puzzling us through the years, Martin Gardner (1914-2010).  Revisit some of our favorite moments on TSoTP with Mr. Gardner:

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 1

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 2

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 3

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 4

The Martin Gardner Interview – Part 5

Happy Birthday, Martin Gardner!

Martin Gardner Documentary

–

And some puzzles!

[*N.B. These contests are no longer running, but will no doubt tease your brain and challenge your creativity... go here for our "Hall of Fame" responders.]

Professor on the Escalator Puzzle

Professor on the Escalator Answer / The Flight Around the World Puzzle

The Flight Around the World Answer / The Absent-Minded Teller Puzzle

The Absent-Minded Teller Answer / The Fork in the Road Puzzle

The Fork in the Road Answer / The Amorous Bugs Puzzle

The Amorous Bugs Answer / The Hole in the Sphere Puzzle

The Hole in the Sphere Answer

–

And some miscellany!

Most Eminent Man of Letters and Numbers

More Gardner Goodies

Hexaflexa-what?

——–

“His was a clarifying intelligence: he said his talent was asking good questions and transmitting the answers clearly and crisply.”

– The New York Times: Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, Dies at 95

“[A] journalist whose omnivorous curiosity gave rise to wide-ranging writings that popularized mathematics, explored theology and philosophy, debunked pseudoscience and provided in-depth analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat…”

– Washington Post: Martin Gardner, prolific math and science writer, dies at 95

“For Gardner, the game is the life.”

– Scientific American Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester

Here’s a Q&A our own Laura Evans recently conducted with them:

Laura: Do you think Abbott’s social observations apply to today’s society?

Banchoff & Lindgren: Some of the depictions of life in Flatland respond to specific conditions in Victorian England, which are now mainly of historical interest.  Nevertheless, many of the topics of Abbott’s satire remain relevant, for example, the superficiality of what passes for knowledge, the unreflecting deference to prevailing opinions and authority, and the treatment of women. Flatland women are mere (one-dimensional) line segments, a fitting representation of their relegation to the narrowly defined role of child-bearers and housekeepers. Polygons with so many sides that they are indistinguishable from circles have a vested interest in maintaining their power, something as true about our leaders today as it was in Abbott’s time.

Laura: Have you ever used Flatland to teach students about mathematics?

B&L: We have used the book in multi-variable calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, and differential geometry, as well as liberal arts mathematics classes. We constantly encourage students to think in terms of dimensional analogies.  Theorems about squares and circles in the Euclidean plane lead to corresponding results about cubes and spheres in three-dimensional space.  There is no better way to introduce students to this process than to appeal to the story of Flatland.  By encouraging students to empathize with the limited perspective of a square confined to the plane, we enable them to appreciate solid geometry, both synthetic and analytic, and to generalize results to higher-dimensional geometry.

Laura: How many of your fellow mathematicians have read Flatland?

B&L: Because many standard texts refer to Flatland and teachers often suggest it as supplementary reading, most English-speaking mathematicians have read at least part of it. Flatland has been translated into seventeen foreign languages, and so many international mathematicians are familiar with the story.

Laura: Can a non-mathematician read and appreciate Flatland?

B&L: For the past 125 years, Flatland has appealed to a wide audience for a variety of reasons: It is an extended metaphor beautifully expressed in the language of mathematics; it is a satirical commentary on Victorian society; it is a geometric version of Plato’s parable of the cave; it is an expression of religious principle; it is part of Abbott’s exposition of the role that imagination plays in the acquisition of knowledge; it is the classic introduction to higher-dimensional geometry. We hope that our notes and commentary will enable all readers of Flatland, mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike, to understand and appreciate it more fully.

Laura: Disregarding what shapes symbolize in terms of social status in Flatland; if you could be a shape, which would you be and why?

B&L: Since a Flatlander’s social status as well as his intelligence is completely determined by his shape, it is not easy to disregard what shapes symbolize.  In terms of intrinsic beauty, it is difficult to match a regular pentagon, where the ratio of the length of a diagonal to the length of a side has been considered one of the most beautiful numbers in mathematics, the “golden ratio.”  Further, it is an appealing idea to be a five-sided figure, one generation removed from the Square, who represents Edwin Abbott Abbott himself.

On Saturdays when I was a boy of 14 or 15, it was my habit to ride my red Roadmaster bicycle to the various thrift shops in my home town. One afternoon, at Clarice’s Values, I unearthed a beat-up paperback of Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,” a collection of essays debunking crank beliefs and pseudoscientific quackery, with wonderful chapters about flying saucers, the hollow Earth, ESP and Atlantis. The book, Gardner’s second, was originally published in 1952 under the title “In the Name of Science.” I probably read it around 1962 and found it — as newspaper critics of that era were wont to say — unputdownable.

In 1981 as a young staffer at The Washington Post Book World, I reviewed Gardner’s “Science: Good, Bad and Bogus,” a kind of sequel to “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,” and found it . . . unputdownable. A few years later, in 1989, I wrote about “Gardner’s Whys & Wherefores,” a volume that opened with appreciations of wonderful, if slightly unfashionable, writers such as G.K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany and H.G. Wells. I wrote at much greater length in 1996 about Gardner’s so-called “collected essays” — really just a minuscule selection — gathered together as the nearly 600-page compendium “The Night Is Large.” There I called its author our most eminent man of letters and numbers.

By that last word I was alluding to Gardner’s celebrated Scientific American columns devoted to mathematical games and recreations. Written over the course of 25 years, these are currently being repackaged by Cambridge University Press as “The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library“; the most recent volume, No. 3 of a planned 15, is titled “Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll and Reversi.” Amazingly, Gardner is largely self-taught in mathematics.

I give all this personalia just to underscore that I’ve been an awestruck Martin Gardner fan my entire life — but then I’m in very good company. Gardner’s admirers have included Arthur C. Clarke, W.H. Auden (who particularly cherished “The Ambidextrous Universe,” a study of symmetry and asymmetry), Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter and the entire French literary group called the Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature). Of course, Gardner is particularly revered — by all kinds of people — for his most famous book: “The Annotated ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ ” (later complemented or replaced by “More Annotated Alice” and “The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition”). That first book virtually launched the entire mini-genre of “annotated” classics, among which are Gardner’s own “Annotated ‘Casey at the Bat’ ” and “Annotated ‘Night Before Christmas.’ “

And that’s still not all.

Keep reading at the Washington Post >>

For today’s mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children’s magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.

Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared “activity features” and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner’s was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.

At that point, Mr. Gardner was 42 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on “recreational mathematics,” a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.

He quit his job with Humpty Dumpty.

On Wednesday, Mr. Gardner will celebrate his 95th birthday with the publication of another book — his second book of essays and mathematical puzzles to be published just this year. With more than 70 books to his name, he is the world’s best-known recreational mathematician, and has probably introduced more people to the joys of math than anyone in history.

How is this possible?

Continue reading at the Times >>

Cambridge is currently in the midst of publishing Gardner’s entire Scientific American catalog – the first time they’ll appear in a set. The latest book is Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll, and Reversi.

Don’t miss our 5-part interview series by Don Albers, posted last year. Click here to read it >>

In [Principia Mathematica], the authors famously take 362 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2, using a method so arcane that Cambridge University Press could not find anyone to evaluate the manuscript and Russell and Whitehead were made to pay for the printing themselves.