...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, July 18, 2014

Friday Potpourri


 A smallish bowl of math ghoulash from this week:

1)  Ed Frenkel's recent public talk at Oxford (GOOD stuff):
http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/love-and-math

2)  The Fourier Transform (from The Guardian):
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/13/fourier-transform-maths-equations-history

3)  Another interesting (in a nerve-wracking way) puzzle from Presh Talwalkar (Zeckhauser’s Paradox):   http://ow.ly/z7Jx2

4)  John Allen Paulos talks attraction, statistics, and Bayes Theorem in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/the-advanced-metrics-of-attraction.html?ref=science&_r=0

5)  Vi Hart, being her cool self again (when she's not doing microwave countdowns!), takes a look at reverse Cantor diagonalization -- now if she could just add a 1/2 speed button to her vids ;-):
http://ow.ly/zaEDC

6) Mike Lawler and the boys teach some combinatorics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqbduReiKvw&feature=youtu.be

7) These two links just showing up in my Twitter feed (h/t to Alex Bogomolny and Gary Davis) on Bill Gates and Common Core (good reads):
http://t.co/sxXQOJp2un 
http://tinyurl.com/o3cybpu

8)  And it was a hugely oddball week over at Math-Frolic with talk of Richard Feynman, Sally Ride, Comcast, but little math. Maybe back-to-normal next week...


--- It feels impossible to even put up a blog post today, without acknowledging the horrific news of yesterday, a very dark day. Sympathies (...despite what little potency they have) to any/all directly affected by the tragedies... NOT proud to be part of the human race today. 
A peaceful, contemplative weekend to all... somehow.

ADDENDUM: now have to add this ;-) just appearing in my Twitter feed (h/t Sam Knight):





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