Gems from the Heredity Archive

From the Archive

As a postdoc studying chromosomal structure with David Agard and John Sedat in the late 1980s, Andrew Belmont had observed intriguing ultrastructural details in interphase nuclei. “We’d see large-scale fi bers about 100 nanometers thick, and then there’d be a 10to 30-nanometer-thick fi ber looping out, which we thought might represent an active gene,” says Belmont. “However, we couldn’t rule ou...

From the Archive

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) has many different effects on endothelial cells, stimulating, for example, their proliferation, differentiation, and migration. In the early 2000s, however, it remained unclear how all of these activities were coordinated to induce the formation of complex vascular networks. But that began to change in 2003, when Christer Betsholtz and colleagues reveal...

Lessons from the JMCB Archive

Six mathematical gems from the history of distance geometry

This is a partial account of the fascinating history of Distance Geometry. We make no claim to completeness, but we do promise a dazzling display of beautiful, elementary mathematics. We prove Heron’s formula, Cauchy’s theorem on the rigidity of polyhedra, Cayley’s generalization of Heron’s formula to higher dimensions, Menger’s characterization of abstract semi-metric spaces, a result of Gödel...

Combinatorial Gems

Although this lecture does not contain many offical Olympiad problems, the arguments which are used are all common elements of Olympiad problem solving. Some of these perhaps could have made nice Olympiad problems, if not for the fact that they were already well-known due to their importance in higher mathematics. Most of this is sourced from the excellent combinatorics course developed by Benn...