John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

How the Hippies Saved Physics Book Revie...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math, Suggested Reading on 04 2nd, 2012 | 4 Comments

[ReviewAZON name="How the Hippies Saved Physics" id="2" display="inlinepost" asin="0393076369" trackingid="antoniocangia-20" country="us" width="200px" float="left" imagetop="10px"]How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival David Kaiser W.W. Norton and Company, New York,...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math on 01 19th, 2012 | 1 Comment

This article is a follow up to the previous article Estimating the Cost and Schedule of Mathematical Software. In the previous article, the author advocated using software engineering expert Barry Boehm’s Basic COCOMO Embedded Mode cost model to estimate the cost and schedule of mathematical software...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math on 01 10th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Mathematics and mathematical software combined with today’s powerful computers can deliver large improvements in speed and efficiency as well as new useful features. Mathematical software is in widespread use: digital video such as YouTube and Skype, digital audio such as MP3 files, JPEG images,...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math on 10 31st, 2011 | 13 Comments

This article is the third in a series on possible ways to use mathematics to cure or treat cancer, that began with Can Mathematics Cure Cancer?. It presents the Bathtub Mechanism, a possible way to kill cells with abnormal numbers of chromosomes, a common characteristic of many cancer cells, in greater...

Tackling Cancer with Math...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math on 10 7th, 2011 | 1 Comment

The recent death of Apple founder Steve Jobs from pancreatic cancer at the young age of fifty-six highlights the dismal progress in the War on Cancer, despite over $200 billion, over one million published research papers, and the efforts of hundreds of thousands of highly qualified, hard working, committed...

The Cold Hit Problem...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math, Probability Theory and Statistics on 09 25th, 2011 | 2 Comments

The previous article Are Fingerprints Unique? discussed the case of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim American attorney from the Portland, Oregon area who was wrongly identified as one of the Madrid train bombers in 2004 by the FBI based on an erroneous fingerprint identification. The Mayfield case is probably the...

Are Fingerprints Unique?...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Essential Math, History on 09 20th, 2011 | 4 Comments

On March 11, 2004 a series of bombs exploded aboard four commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 192 people and injuring 2050. The Spanish police recovered a bag containing detonating devices which had a latent fingerprint that the Spanish shared with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation...

The Magical Mathematics of Numb3rs...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math, Suggested Reading on 08 29th, 2011 | 14 Comments

Numb3rs is a television show that ran for six seasons on CBS from 2005 to 2010 about FBI agent Don Eppes and his brother Charles, a child math prodigy turned math professor at CalSci (a thinly disguised Caltech), who fight crime with mathematics in a sunny, smog-free TV version of Los Angeles filled with an...

Creating Cartoon Voices with Math...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math, Software on 08 15th, 2011 | 2 Comments

Have you ever wanted to create a humorous or entertaining voice like a cartoon character’s voice for a get-well video, a Valentine’s video, the narration for a DVD of home videos, an advertisement for your business or some other application? This article tells how to create cartoon voices using...

Can Mathematics Cure Cancer?...

Posted by John F. McGowan, Ph.D. in Applied Math on 07 11th, 2011 | 7 Comments

“I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man...