Related papers: The Ishango Bone: Evidence for Intentional Arithme…
What is it about human brains that allows us to reason symbolically whereas most other animals cannot? There is evidence that dynamic binding, the ability to combine neurons into groups on the fly, is necessary for symbolic thought, but…
We collect nine corpora of representative Chinese poetry for the time span of 1046 BCE and 1644 CE for studying the history of Chinese words, collocations, and patterns. By flexibly integrating our own tools, we are able to provide new…
Pulli Kolam is an ancient mathematical artform that is still practiced today in south India by over a quarter million people. "Pulli" in the Tamil language means dots. A specific type of pulli kolam is "sikku" kolam where a series of dots…
How complex is an Ising model? Usually, this is measured by the computational complexity of its ground state energy problem. Yet, this complexity measure only distinguishes between planar and non-planar interaction graphs, and thus fails to…
Thermodynamic properties of the ferromagnetic Ising model on the hierarchical pentagon lattice is studied by means of the tensor network methods. The lattice consists of pentagons, where 3 or 4 of them meet at each vertex. Correlation…
A class of random graphs is introduced and studied. The graphs are constructed in an algorithmic way from five motifs which were found in [Milo R., Shen-Orr S., Itzkovitz S., Kashtan N., Chklovskii D., Alon U., Science, 2002, 298, 824-827].…
For over 165 million years, dinosaurs reigned on this planet. Their entire existence saw variations in their body size and mass . Understanding the relationship between various attributes such as femur length, breadth; humerus length,…
Rocking stones, balanced in counter-intuitive positions have always intrigued geologists. In our paper we explain this phenomenon based on high-precision scans of pebbles which exhibit similar behavior. We construct their convex hull and…
Arrangements of lines and pseudolines are fundamental objects in discrete and computational geometry. They also appear in other areas of computer science, such as the study of sorting networks. Let $B_n$ be the number of nonisomorphic…
The number of non-negative integer matrices with given row and column sums appears in a variety of problems in mathematics and statistics but no closed-form expression for it is known, so we rely on approximations of various kinds. Here we…
Puzzle solving is a difficult problem in its own right, even when the pieces are all square and build up a natural image. But what if these ideal conditions do not hold? One such application domain is archaeology, where restoring an…
Within anthropology, the use of three-dimensional (3D) imaging has become increasingly common and widespread since it broadens the available avenues for addressing a wide range of key anthropological issues. The ease with which 3D models…
A special class of Jordan algebras over a field $F$ of characteristic zero is considered. Such an algebra consists of an $r$-dimensional subspace of the vector space of all square matrices of a fixed order $n$ over $F$. It contains the…
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls over 60 years ago is widely regarded as one of the greatest archaeological breakthroughs in modern history. Recent study of the scrolls presents ongoing computational challenges, including determining…
Recent work has shown that probabilistic models based on pairwise interactions-in the simplest case, the Ising model-provide surprisingly accurate descriptions of experiments on real biological networks ranging from neurons to genes.…
Whether the Indus Valley sign system (c. 2600-1900 BCE) encodes spoken language has been debated for decades. This paper introduces a multi-metric discrimination framework that tests the observed Indus corpus against two kinds of…
The transnational ivory trade continues to drive the decline of elephant populations across Africa, and trafficking networks remain difficult to disrupt. Tusks seized by law enforcement officials carry forensic information on the…
A mathematically and culturally natural modification of Evart Bruins' explanation of the genesis of the numbers on the Old Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 gives an economical accounting for the "missing pairs" in his reconstruction. When the…
Today, the Ising model is an archetype describing collective ordering processes. And, as such, it is widely known in physics and far beyond. Less known is the fact that the thesis defended by Ernst Ising 100 years ago (in 1924) contained…
The paper presents a critical introduction to the complex statistical models used in ${}^{14}$C dating. The emphasis is on the estimation of the transit time between a sequence of archeological layers. Although a frequentist estimation of…