...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, September 19, 2014

Weekly Potpourri


A short compilation of math bits this week (been busy on other things):

1) 
RJ Lipton's blog posted a little tribute to the interesting work of Stanislaw Ulam:
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/some-strange-math-facts/
(and on a side note, worth mentioning that RJ Lipton was recently awarded the 2014 Knuth Prize for contributions to computer science)

2)  Stephen Wolfram announced an online (cloud) version of Mathematica this week:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/09/15/launching-today-mathematica-online/

3)  Mathbabe takes Christian Rudder's new "Dataclysm" book to task:
http://mathbabe.org/2014/09/16/christian-rudders-dataclysm/

and on another day she offered this thought experiment (which, like any good conundrum, drew LLLOTS of comments):
http://mathbabe.org/2014/09/17/the-green-eyed-blue-eyed-puzzle-conundrum/

BUT (again a side-note), her most powerful post of the week, was NON-math (and very personal) here: http://tinyurl.com/k6pql3l

4)   Interesting 'language of math' article:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410304008

5)  Jacob Lurie, the Harvard math prof., who won a MacArthur Fellowship this week:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/a-macarthur-for-math-prof/

6)  My own review of William Poundstone's latest book, "Rock Breaks Scissors" precedes this post.


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