A pioneering woman in mathematics

Born December 16, 1932, Grace Alele-Williams is now 80 years old.

Prof. Grace Alele-Williams

She has a brilliant reputation as a pioneering educationist, being

• the first Nigerian woman to receive a doctorate degree (University of Chicago, 1963) 
• the first female professor of mathematics education in Nigeria
• the first female Vice Chancellor of a Nigerian university  (University of Benin, 1985-1992). 

  

  me and Dr. Williams at the ball (Sept 30, 2011)

 References: 
Women mathematicians at agnesscott.edu: A biography of Grace Alele-Williams
Punch Newspaper: Grace Alele-Williams hits 80
Wikipedia: Grace Alele-Williams 
YNaija: Photos from the TW Phoenix Gala Celebrating Matriachs and Protegées
Bellanaija: About the Phoenix Gala by TW (Today's Woman) Magazine, with photos  
AMU-CHMA: African Mathematical Union - Commission on the History of Mathematics in Africa

Carnival of Mathematics 93

Welcome to the 93rd edition of the Carnival of Mathematics.

Here's the roundup:

Mr Honner verifies that this is NOT a trig. function. 

Look closely: is this really a trigonometric function?

John D. Cook shows that the Probability of Long Runs is greater than we think. 

E-Painting: Eye - Iris, by Tosin Otitoju

Nithesh at Sententia adores this book and wrote a review.
The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy "is about the history of the several attempts made to solve the long standing problem in Number theory called the “Riemann Hypothesis”. It also describes the larger picture about the lives of mathematicians, their idiosyncrasies, insecurities and their passion for the subject." 

Book cover: the music of the primes

Ed at Learn To Fish demonstrates how to draw regular polygons.

How to draw a regular pentagon

White Group Mathematics features advice for examination candidates at the A-levels: Focus on what comes next.

E-painting: Let's Fly, by Tosin Otitoju

Pat B constructs antiparallels, recommending the topic for high school geometry. 

Dragon, by Joan Martines, Messine, 1583

If you want more pictures, see The Golden Age of Maps/Charts online or at the French National Library till next month

If you want some physics, the Foundational Questions Institute has announced winners of this year's essay contest.

Gracias + Te amo: Cora Sadosky passed away exactly two years ago.   She was the best math professor, ever. 

See Carnival 92 at White Group Mathematics.
Carnival 94 will be hosted in January 2013 by Paul at The Aperiodical

An unexpected power law that relates site traffic to ranking by site traffic

How easy is it to estimate your number of site visits from site ranking and vice-versa?
Very easy: double the visits to halve the ranking.
I just blogged at upnaira.blogspot.com about finding the connection, and how rewarding to end up with such a neat graph:

Relationship between Alexa rank and monthly visitors

Here's the data I used:

Site	%Traffic Reach	Est. Monthly Visitors*	Alexa rank
yahoo	20	1000000000	4
craigslist	1.5	75000000	42
meetup	0.2	10000000	465
nairaland	0.08	4000000	1385
jobberman	0.02	1000000	4653
cp-africa	0.004	200000	44206
wemabank	0.00028	14000	557445

*The monthly visitors numbers are estimated by assuming jobberman has 1million visitors per month (I think that corresponds to a ranking around 5k) and that the traffic reach percentage (data given by alexa for each site) is simply number of visitors for this site / a fixed number corresponding to all traffic.  That is, take the traffic to be proportional to the traffic reach percentage.

Well, who wants to do this experiment on a large scale?
Plot Global rank against Traffic-reach % or Traffic-Reach-estimate-of-Monthly-Visitors and see how well the data fit this law.
Alexa.com ranks at least 10million sites, so you could test with that many datapoints. 

Advertisement: Read my books. (Preview)

Can you guess the movie titles?

You need to know a little math to figure these out!

Mathematical film titles: check below for some answers

I found another version at spikedmath:

Movie math Quiz: another version

Enjoy!
Do you have more?