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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 LoRdTAW on Monday November 14 2016, @05:33PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday November 14 2016, @05:33PM (#426591) Journal

    Not too hard to grok this. The evil floating point bit level hack accesses the float memory as a long int and stores it to i. Then it's shifted right by one and subtracted from the magic number 0x5f3759df. It's then converted back to a float and stored to y. Then its off to a bit of math to take the original number (divided by two), multiplied by the square of y, subtracted from 1.5 and multiplied once again by y all as float. An optional second iteration perhaps further refines the answer. Then the result is returned. The magic number is probably a constant and easily conveyed in hex form that allows the result to properly align to the IEEE float format to avoid NaN errors.

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