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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 13 2016, @04:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can-count-on-it dept.

Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests. The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.

Dr Tim Fawcett and Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Exeter, found, using statistical analysis of the number of citations to 2000 articles in a leading physics journal, that articles are less likely to be referenced by other physicists if they have lots of mathematical equations on each page. [...] Dr Higginson said: "We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics.

"This is an important issue because it shows there could be a disconnection between mathematical theory and experimental work. This presents a potentially enormous barrier to all kinds of scientific progress."

http://phys.org/news/2016-11-physicists-mathematics.html

[Abstract]: Statistical Analysis of the Effect of Equations on Citations


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  • (Score: 2) by jcross on Monday November 14 2016, @02:13AM

    by jcross (4009) on Monday November 14 2016, @02:13AM (#426410)

    A sawtooth wave can be decomposed into a series of sine wave harmonics, with each having a relative amplitude of 1/n, where n is the number of that harmonic. The really high harmonics mostly just make the points of the sawtooth sharper, and beyond the Nyquist limit it's not possible to make it any sharper. If the Nyquist frequency is above your threshold of hearing, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.

    So applying the limit to sine waves doesn't prevent it from being applied to other waveforms as well, it just affects the apparent shape of the wave via its harmonics. If Jimmy Page were to somehow manage to play a 20 kHz sawtooth on his guitar, and we sampled it at 44.1 kHz, the corners of it would be so rounded that it wouldn't be distinguishable from a sine wave anyway. Wave shape just doesn't matter at the edge of the limit because you lose all the higher harmonics that would distinguish one shape from another.

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