Nearly everyone has trouble making sense of big numbers in the millions, billions and trillions — but it doesn’t have to be that way, writes Steven Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics in a New York Times op-ed co-authored with Aiyana Green, an undergraduate majoring in policy analysis and management in the College of Human Ecology, if you relate big numbers to something familiar.
“Consider how long it would take for a million seconds to tick by," Strogatz and Green write in the piece. "Do the math, and you’ll find that a million seconds is about 12 days. And a billion seconds? That’s about 32 years. Suddenly the vastness of the gulf between a million and a billion becomes obvious.”
Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University
From left, Xi Yang, PhD '10, senior lecturer of finance in the SC Johnson College of Business; Christine Ye; Christine Ye Award recipient Margaret E. Foster, doctoral candidate in communication; Cornelia Ye Award recipient Naman Agrawal, doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior; Cornelia Ye; and Derina Samuel, associate director of graduate student development at the Center for Teaching Innovation.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
Artist concept of the gas giant planet WD 1856 b orbiting a white dwarf star. The planet is 7 times larger than the Earth-sized white dwarf it orbits. WD 1856 b has methane and hazes in its atmosphere, which would give it a similar color to Saturn's moon Titan. The white dwarf formed from a star that died 5 billion years ago, and has been cooling ever since, giving it an orange colour similar to the Sun.
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Dressed in clean-room suits, the Warrior-Scholar Project’s STEM boot camp cohort toured the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility.
