The number π is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159. The number π appears in many formulae across mathematics and physics. It is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers, although fractions such as are commonly used to approximate it. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends, nor enters a permanently repeating pattern. It is a transcendental number, meaning that it cannot be a solution of an equation involving only finite sums, products, powers, and integers. The transcendence of π implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge. The decimal digits of π appear to be randomly distributed, but no proof of this conjecture has been found.
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.
In mathematics, the harmonic series is the infinite series formed by summing all positive unit fractions:
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Charles Louis Fefferman is an American mathematician at Princeton University, where he is currently the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 for his contributions to mathematical analysis.
Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.
Herbert Saul Wilf was an American mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote numerous books and research papers. Together with Neil Calkin he founded The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics in 1994 and was its editor-in-chief until 2001.
William Wade Dunham is an American writer who was originally trained in topology but became interested in the history of mathematics and specializes in Leonhard Euler. He has received several awards for writing and teaching on this subject.
The Euler Book Prize is an award named after Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) and given annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field.
Catherine ("Cathy") Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.
Peter Richtarik is a Slovak mathematician and computer scientist working in the area of big data optimization and machine learning, known for his work on randomized coordinate descent algorithms, stochastic gradient descent and federated learning. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Big data ethics, also known simply as data ethics, refers to systemizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct in relation to data, in particular personal data. Since the dawn of the Internet the sheer quantity and quality of data has dramatically increased and is continuing to do so exponentially. Big data describes this large amount of data that is so voluminous and complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. Recent innovations in medical research and healthcare, such as high-throughput genome sequencing, high-resolution imaging, electronic medical patient records and a plethora of internet-connected health devices have triggered a data deluge that will reach the exabyte range in the near future. Data ethics is of increasing relevance as the quantity of data increases because of the scale of the impact.
Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create "unfair" outcomes, such as "privileging" one category over another in ways different from the intended function of the algorithm.
Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) is a case management and decision support tool developed and owned by Northpointe used by U.S. courts to assess the likelihood of a defendant becoming a recidivist.
Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian science journalist, biographer, and historian of mathematics.
A data economy is a global digital ecosystem in which data is gathered, organized, and exchanged by a network of companies, individuals, and institutions to create economic value. The raw data is collected by a variety of factors, including search engines, social media websites, online vendors, brick and mortar vendors, payment gateways, software as a service (SaaS) purveyors, and an increasing number of firms deploying connected devices on the Internet of Things (IoT). Once collected, this data is typically passed on to individuals or firms, often for a fee. In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies have developed early models to regulate the data economy.
Digital redlining is the practice of creating and perpetuating inequities between already marginalized groups specifically through the use of digital technologies, digital content, and the internet. The concept of digital redlining is an extension of the practice of redlining in housing discrimination, a historical legal practice in the United States and Canada dating back to the 1930s where red lines were drawn on maps to indicate poor and primarily black neighborhoods that were deemed unsuitable for loans or further development, which created great economic disparities between neighborhoods. The term was popularized by Dr. Chris Gilliard, a privacy scholar, who defines digital redlining as "the creation and maintenance of tech practices, policies, pedagogies, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups".
The sociologyof quantification is the investigation of quantification as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.
Government by algorithm is an alternative form of government or social ordering where the usage of computer algorithms is applied to regulations, law enforcement, and generally any aspect of everyday life such as transportation or land registration. The term "government by algorithm" has appeared in academic literature as an alternative for "algorithmic governance" in 2013. A related term, algorithmic regulation, is defined as setting the standard, monitoring and modifying behaviour by means of computational algorithms – automation of judiciary is in its scope. In the context of blockchain, it is also known as blockchain governance.
Ethics of quantification is the study of the ethical issues associated to different forms of visible or invisible forms of quantification. These could include algorithms, metrics/indicators, statistical and mathematical modelling, as noted in a review of various aspects of sociology of quantification.
