...a companion blog to "Math-Frolic," specifically for interviews, book reviews, weekly-linkfests, and longer posts or commentary than usually found at the Math-Frolic site.

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"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." ---Bertrand Russell (1907) Rob Gluck

"I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it [mathematics] consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-legged animal is an animal." ---Bertrand Russell (1957)

******************************************************************** Rob Gluck

Friday, August 22, 2014

Another Friday Collection


From this week's wonderful world of math:

1)  Shortly, after last week's potpourri came out the 113th Carnival of Mathematics went up; if by any chance you missed it, a lot more mathy links there:
http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=5537

2)  I've referenced this research before, but just last week NPR covered findings that indicate winners of the Fields Medal (and other prizes) actually lowers one's future professional productivity:
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/18/341283394/how-does-winning-fields-medal-effect-mathematicians-productivity

3)  More Deborah Mayo on p-values:
http://errorstatistics.com/2014/08/17/are-p-values-error-probabilities-installment-1/

4)   A post from the always-thoughtful mathematician Robert Talbert (on goals):
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2014/08/18/the-four-things-i-am-really-working-on-this-semester/

5)  In a 'good news' story, the first five winners of the "Breakthrough Prize" for mathematics have agreed to donate a portion of their awards to support math graduate students in the developing world:
https://breakthroughprize.org/?controller=Page&action=news&news_id=19

6)  Peter Woit reports from a conference with a focus on number theory relating to unification in physics:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7114

7)  Much of the recent ICM conference in Seoul has now been uploaded to YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ICM2014VOD/feed
Also, for the pros out there, Terry Tao has put up a blog post covering a finding announced at the conference ("Large Gaps Between Consecutive Prime Numbers"):
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/large-gaps-between-consecutive-prime-numbers/


8)  The 3 Lawler boys work out the symmetries of a cube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN86FeO_Lmg&feature=youtu.be

9)  Nassim Taleb takes this stab at what probability is (pdf):
http://ow.ly/AAxAO 

10)  What better way to round out 10 offerings than with another excellent podcast from the "7th Avenue Project," this time with Jordan Ellenberg (make time for this if you can; it's 67 mins.):
https://soundcloud.com/7th-avenue-project/jordan-ellenberg-radio-interview-how-not-to-be-wrong 
(h/t again to Dr. Noson Yanofsky for pointing me to this)


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