Month: January 2018

What began as an undergraduate project looking at how to create a “typical” map of congressional districts expanded to a national investigation for Duke mathematics chair Jonathan Mattingly. He was generous enough to speak to me about some of his recent work in mathematically investigating gerrymandering and the communication which followed between lawmakers and statisticians.…

“‘Betty, education is the most important thing,” her father said. “We lost our home, our land, our cars, our farm, everything we have ever owned. But what I have in my head, no one can take away from me.’” Six-year-old Beatriz glanced back up at her father and then towards the new life ahead of…

How can we even begin to understand the human brain?  Can we predict the way people will respond to stress by looking at their brains?  Is it possible, even, to predict depression based on observations of the brain? These answers will have to come from sets of data, too big for human minds to work…

Most people don’t see in ferns the glory and grandeur of the mighty angiosperms — the flowering plants — but to those who can, ferns may seem like the only thing you could spend your time researching. Kathleen Pryer, a professor of biology at Duke, is an example of one of these people who found…