...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, June 27, 2014

Headed Into The Weekend


Another week's mishmash of links:

1)  An excerpt from Alex Bellos' latest volume "The Grapes of Math":
http://tinyurl.com/ozffphx
(My own blurb about this fun volume will likely be up on Sunday.)

2)  A surprisingly involved puzzle from Presh Talwalkar last Monday:
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2014/06/23/monday-puzzle-ratio-of-random-numbers/#.U6gHIqjrnKk

3)  Latest podcast guest with Sol Lederman is Sue VanHattum introducing her new volume (as editor), "Playing With Math":
http://wildaboutmath.com/2014/06/23/sue-vanhattum-inspired-by-math-38/
And here is a recent post from Sue about the book:
http://mathmamawrites.blogspot.com/2014/06/playing-with-math-can-we-keep-campaigns.html

4)  The dark side of 'big data,' from mathbabe:
http://mathbabe.org/2014/06/25/the-dark-matter-of-big-data/

5)  Dave Goldberg covers Emmy Noether:
http://io9.com/the-most-important-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of-1594835772/+dave_goldberg

6)  The awarding of the "Breakthrough" prize ($3 million) to five mathematicians earlier in week set off some debate over the appropriateness of such large award sums in science. Philip Ball of The Guardian weighed in here:
http://io9.com/the-most-important-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of-1594835772/+dave_goldberg

7)  Tangential to math, another fascinating physics piece from Natalie Wolchover, this time focused on pilot-wave theory:
http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-hint-at-concrete-quantum-reality/

8) Good, longish article on importance of computer or coding literacy for the future:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/06/computer-science-programming-code-diversity-sexism-education

9)  And not so much math, but important reminder from Cathy O'Neil on what we, users of Google, really are:
http://mathbabe.org/2014/06/24/you-are-not-googles-customer/


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