...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, April 29, 2016

Math From the Week Gone By


Read on....

1)
  Need a mini-brain-workout... try Futility Closet's "Pagan Island" problem:
www.futilitycloset.com/2016/04/24/pagan-island/

2)  Also via Futility Closet, in 1897, the Indiana legislature tried to do some math:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/04/24/podcast-episode-103-legislating-pi
(am afraid this may give ideas to today's Republicans)

3)  Who knew?... I'd never heard of Lyndon LaRouche's connections back to famous mathematicians (Cantor and Riemann) before Michael Harris brought it up:
https://mathematicswithoutapologies.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/riemann-cantor-and-lyndon-larouche/

4)  An essay on the lives and ages of mathematicians from Manil Suri in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/opinion/the-mathematicians-90th-birthday-party.html

5)  Plenty of variety in the latest "Math Teachers At Play" blog carnival:
https://denisegaskins.com/2016/04/25/math-teachers-at-play-97-blog-carnival/

6)  Numberphile with another grr-r-r-reat Tadashi Tokieda piece:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGkvyN6s9cY&feature=youtu.be

7)  Siobhan Roberts on (120-sided) "disdyakis triacontahedron" dice!:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-dice-you-never-knew-you-needed

8) The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics reviewed:
http://math-blog.com/2016/04/27/the-princeton-companion-to-applied-mathematics-review/

9)  Fabulous piece from Dan Engber on 'debunking the debunkers':
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-will-debunk-the-debunkers/

10)  FiveThirtyEight blog offers a "Riddler" puzzle every Friday. The latest here:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-perplexing-puzzle-of-the-proud-partygoers/


Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):

1)  Physicist/Nobelist Frank Wilczek interviewed this week on Krista Tippett's "On Being":

http://www.onbeing.org/program/frank-wilczek-why-is-the-world-so-beautiful/8565

2)  It occurs to me that perhaps two new upcoming books might well be read in tandem:


"The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll
"What We Cannot Know" by Marcus du Sautoy

 

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