...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, October 31, 2014

End-of-week Potpourri


Links from the week:
1)  Some puzzles from Presh Talwalkar started the week:
http://tinyurl.com/ntgfqpk
And some more puzzles here:
http://cavmaths.wordpress.com/puzzles-and-starters/

2)  If you can't get enough of James Grime, Reddit did an AMA ('ask-me-anything') thread with him this week:
http://tinyurl.com/o75p57h

3)  Evelyn Lamb told us about Euclid, geometry, and a possibly grumpy Omar Khayyam here:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/10/28/omar-khayyam-grumpy-with-euclid/

and for Halloween, Evelyn takes on a hot (but scary?) topic in math -- homotopy groups:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/10/31/higher-homotopy-groups-are-spooky/

4)  Some instances of "bad math" from the popular press:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-28/bad-math-that-passes-for-insight

5)  Rubik's Cube fans, have at it (...if you dare):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnsEobXdvzQ#t=137

6)  Back to Presh Talwalkar, who offers up an auditory example of the Bell curve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmOsDTczOFs

7)  Do you like your set theory made simple... see n-Category Cafe:
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/maths_just_in_short_words.html

8)  Lastly, in time for the Holidays... "The Mathematics Devotional" from Clifford Pickover is available:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1454913223/cliffordpickover


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