Happy New Year

By the time this issue of Blog Wyrm publishes, we all will be looking at New Year’s Eve of 2022.  There are, of course, many things that might be said about 2022 but we would simply like to leave the year with a positive message.  May God Bless each and every one of you and may the new year treat each of you well.

Now onto the columns.

Intuitively it is clear that arbitrary moments of a Gaussian distribution must be expressible in terms of the moment’s mean and standard deviation as these are the only two parameters on which the distribution depends.  Still, it isn’t always clear how to make that expression.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital presents Isselis’ Theorem, which explicitly shows how everything connects.

One of the hottest stories of the last couple of months is the spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency empire of Sam Bankman-Fried.  Once the darling of celebrities, media, and capital firms alike, SBF ran fast and loose with other people’s money and came up short.  This month’s CommonCents looks at the factors underlying this disaster and finds that beneath the digital veneer is an old-fashioned swindle enabled by traditional economic factors.

The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular speeds in a gas is important for a variety of reasons.  First is its practical importance in describing the makeup of a thermalized gas.  Second, its mathematical form emphasizes the fundamental difference between the mean and most probable points of a distribution.  Finally, it serves as a theoretical baseline for understanding the difference between systems in equilibrium and not.  This month’s UndertheHood explores the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution numerically giving a concrete foundation to these points.

Enjoy!