June 12, 2011

Cicadas: ready for prime time

Last Friday (June 10 2011), Mint carried my next "A Matter of Numbers" essay. It's about cicadas and pleading with editors.

Do take a look: Cicadas: ready for prime time.

Comments welcome!

3 comments:

Boskoe said...

Amazing article, Dilip (as always).

Anonymous said...

Interesting. So you are saying that the original pool of cicadas came at all frequencies - the surviving frequencies are those that don't have a matching predator? Although I Wiki-thought that "Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts from two to five years". So why the fuss about prime numbers? Is it the same as the "man in the moon" or "canals on mars" phenomenon?

A Chrysanthemum by any other name... said...

There is one flaw with this logic and that is that the solution to the problem leads to a problem similar to the original problem.

The question to start with is that why does a certain species have a cycle of x years and the answer to that is that another species has a cycle of y years. Now please answer, why does a certain species have a cycle of y years?