The avante-garde composer Iannis Xenakis trained firstly as an engineer and then as an architect working in the practice of Le Corbusier. And when he turned his hand to music, he brought the mathematics and aptitudes of an engineer to his compositions. In his works he explores randomness and statistical patterns of many types. In this article for The Guardian, Tom Service explains the power of his work.
The dice used in Las Vegas casinos are not like those you’d find in a kids’ compendium of games or a Monopoly set: they’re made to exacting specifications. They’re larger, with sharper edges and corners, and incorporate a variety of security measures to allow crooked dice to be more easily detected.
This blog article gives you some idea of what makes these dice different.
Not all advances in technology stem from well-planned development projects. Sometimes accidents turn out to be fortuitous. In 2003 Jamie Link shattered a silicon chip, and discovered the fragments were still transmitting signals. “Smart Dust” was the result: microelectomechanical devices with a host of applications. It’s not the only invention to be the result of chance. Read more here:
Florence Nightingale will always be remembered firstly as a nurse, indeed one of the founders of nursing as a profession. She established her reputation serving in the hospital at Scutari in Istanbul during the Crimean war. But arguably, her greatest contribution came when she returned to England and applied her statistical skills to puzzling out why so many soldiers had died in her hospital. She became convinced that the answer lay in the poor sanitation and ventilation and she became a campaigner for better hospitals in military and civilian spheres.
Read more in this blog article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
