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News & Views item - October 2006 |
CSIRO's Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes Win 2006 Mathematics Ig Nobel Prize. (October 7, 2006)
Postdoctoral fellow Piers Barnes at CSIRO's Division of Industrial Physics when approached by photographer Nic Svenson whinging about the difficulty she had taking group photographs in which none of the individuals was caught with eyes shut produced the following argument and equation:
The probability of one person spoiling a photo by blinking equals their expected number of blinks (x), multiplied by the time during which the photo could be spoilt (t) - if the expected time between blinks is longer than the time in which a photo can be spoilt.
This makes the probability of one person not blinking 1 - xt. For two people it's
(1 - xt).(1 - xt) and for a group of people it's (1 - xt)n, n being the number of people.
This means (1 - xt)n is also the probability of a good photo. Therefore, the number of photos should be 1/(1 - xt)n.
Where the average number of blinks made by someone getting their photo taken is ten per minute and the average blink lasts about 250 milliseconds and, in good indoor light, a camera shutter stays open for about eight milliseconds.
As a rule of thumb Barnes advises, "For groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there's good light and two if the light's bad."
Both Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes attended the October 5 prize giving ceremony.
Together with Terry Tao's winning a Fields Medal, its
been a bumper year.
See
"Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed," Velocity, June 2006.
The winners have all done things that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.
"The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." --Nature
The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
ORNITHOLOGY
: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.