AI canât replace humans, but the technology is making inroads in more and more business sectors.
In an oft-quoted interview with Life magazine in 1970, Marvin Minsky, an MIT researcher and pioneer in artificial intelligence, predicted that scientists were about three to eight years away from creating a machine as intelligent as the average human. Such a machine would âbe able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight,â Minksy said, and it would learn at such a âfantastic speedâ that it would reach genius level within just a few months.
Fifty years later, Minksyâs vision of a machine on par with the human brain still hasnât been realized â but popular AI tools, such as Googleâs search engine and Appleâs Siri, have become part of everyday life, and machines are learning how to master an array of complex tasks, from operating self-driving cars to spotting tumors to monitoring crops.
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IMAGE: In one of his courses, Dr. Isaac Elishakoff conducts a simple test to check the knowledge retained by his students from differential equations. It turns out that most never got. view more
Credit: Florida Atlantic University
To provoke more interest and excitement for students and lecturers alike, a professor from Florida Atlantic University s College of Engineering and Computer Science is spicing up the study of complex differential mathematical equations using relevant history of algebra. In a paper published in the
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Isaac Elishakoff, Ph.D., provides a refreshing perspective and a special shout out to Stephen Colbert, comedian and host of CBS s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His motivation? Colbert previously referred to mathematical equations as the devil s sentences and an unnatural commingling of letters and numbers - with the worst being the quadratic equation - an infernal salad of numbers, letters and sy