One in a million

One in a million.

Thirty-six years ago, I was the first Cobra Pilot to shake the hand of a surviving Cobra Pilot who lost his tail rotor assembly while on a Hunter-Killer mission in South Vietnam. It was a hot, humid day at Quan Loi. I was an in-country trained Cobra maintenance officer for A Troop 3/ 17 Air Cav and Operation Lam Son 719 had been underway for weeks. The siren went off, which meant one of our Hel...

Navigating One Million Tags

Web 2.0 users engage in collaborative activities. Many 2.0 websites allow their users to associate words (a.k.a. tags) with the users’ own and with other users’ content. The result is an additional layer with descriptions of web resources. The created associations between tag sets and web resources are used to facilitate social navigation, individual resource re-finding, defining communities of...

One million insects--a lot of parasites?

One in a million, or one in thousand: What is the morbidity of rabies in India?

R abies is the 10 th biggest cause of death due to infectious diseases worldwide [1]. It is estimated that 2.5 billion people across 100 countries are at risk of contracting rabies [1]. The annual death toll is around 50 000–60 000, with 99% occurring in tropical developing countries [1]. Around 36% of these rabies related deaths occur in India every year with dog bites being responsible for 95...

Landau’s function for one million billions

Let Sn denote the symmetric group with n letters, and g(n) the maximal order of an element of Sn. If the standard factorization of M into primes is M = q1 1 q α2 2 . . . q αk k , we define l(M) to be q α1 1 + q α2 2 + . . .+ q αk k ; one century ago, E. Landau proved that g(n) = maxl(M)≤n M and that, when n goes to infinity, log g(n) ∼ √ n log(n). There exists a basic algorithm to compute g(n) ...