...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, March 21, 2014

A Few Potpourri Pass-Alongs


I've been so busy this week looking for an airplane, reading up on gravitational waves, watching events in Ukraine, and readying for the NCAA Tournament (...not necessarily in that order), have only found time to compile this short list of weekend potpourri…:

1) How do you encourage student persistence/integrity in the Internet Age?… this is no doubt a significant problem for education:

http://accumulatearate.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/famous-math-problems-in-the-internet-age/

2) John McGowan on "how to learn math":

http://math-blog.com/2014/03/17/how-to-learn-math/

3) Mike Lawler goes over the Pigeonhole Principle (taking a cue from Cliff Pickover's "Math Book"), in one of his recent videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZALb2ECczc&feature=youtu.be

4) Hat tip to Ed Frenkel for passing along this list of pretty good "intellectual" jokes:

http://www.tickld.com/x/20-jokes-that-only-intellectuals-will-understand

Also, a little Carly Simon-inspired humor from the week:

https://twitter.com/davidwees/status/418811617761968128/photo/1

5) One of my FAVORITE websites, "Futility Closet" now has a podcast… no math in the first episode, but too much fun not to pass along:

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/03/17/podcast/

p.s. -- I had the pleasure of interviewing Greg Ross, proprietor of Futility Closet, back in 2012, for Math-Frolic (great seeing him strike out on his own with a book and a new podcast):

http://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2012/11/greg-ross-of-futility-closet.html


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