Once a new commercial product, technology, political opinion, or social norm is adopted by a few people, these few often put peer pressure on others to consider adopting it as well. Those who adopt next put even more pressure on the rest of the population. This cascading “epidemic” effect is often called diffusion in social […]
Locust swarms pose a major threat to agriculture, notably in northern Africa and the Middle East. In the early stages of aggregation, locusts form hopper bands. These are coordinated groups that march in columnar structures that are often kilometers long and may contain millions of individuals. We propose a model for the formation of locust […]
A single soap bubble has a spherical shape since it minimizes its surface area subject to a fixed enclosed volume of air. When two soap bubbles collide, they form a "double-bubble" composed of three spherical caps. The double-bubble minimizes total surface area among all sets enclosing two fixed volumes. This was proven mathematically in a […]
Frequency hopping is a method of transmitting signals by rapidly switching between many frequency channels, following some sequence of frequencies known to the transmitter and the receiver. This technique is used in the CDMA (code division multiple access) systems, and has many civilian and military applications. For successful transmission minimizing signal interference, we want to use sets […]
Joint work with Larry Shepp & Philip Ernst In this paper we develop a mathematical model to address an ongoing politico-economic debate between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats in the US say that government spending can be used to “grease the wheels’ of the economy, create wealth, and increase employment; the Republicans say that government spending […]
I will discuss the concept of transfinite ζ-metrics. In some details I will discuss transfinite Apollonian metric in the settings of semi-metric spaces. I will discuss specific examples of domains where the transfinite Apollonian metric can be computed explicitly. This is a preliminary work.
Approximately 500 million tweets are sent everyday. Scientists monitor these tweets to predict the spread of disease, better allocate social welfare services, help first responders during natural disasters, and many other important tasks. A key step in each of these tasks is estimating the location the tweet was sent from. In this talk, I discuss how to combine machine […]
The traditional method of treating most human diseases is to direct a therapy against targets in the host patient, whereas conventional therapies against infectious diseases are directed against the pathogen. Unfortunately, the efficacy of pathogen-oriented therapies and their ability to combat emerging threats such as genetically engineered and non-traditional pathogens and toxins have been limited […]
In this presentation, some fundamentals of electrostatics in biology will be discussed with focus on the fact that most biological macromolecules including nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and proteins are negatively-charged. Electroneutrality requires cations to move toward the macromolecules where they both screen and bind to the negatively-charged groups. An important class of mathematical models of species-flux […]
