...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, August 8, 2014

Friday Potpourri


Another week's-worth of schtuff:

1)  Sue VanHattum has started a new "Math Mama's Gazette" for students and teachers. First issue here:
http://mathmamawrites.blogspot.com/2014/08/math-mamas-gazette-issue-number-one.html

2)  Stephen Stigler's 7 pillars of statistics:
http://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2014/08/05/stiglers-seven-pillars-of-statistical-wisdom/

3)  The fifth run of Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" (10-week) MOOC course begins around end of September:
https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink

4)  A follow-up to last year's claimed proof for the Millennium Prize Navier-Stokes equations (now being re-worked):
http://tinyurl.com/ohm44q9

5)  No doubt, inevitable, a "Common Core Math For Parents For Dummies" is now on the way:
http://christopherdanielson.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/news-a-new-project/

6)  Frequentist and Bayesian interpretations of statistics (side-by-side):
http://www.workinginuncertainty.co.uk/probtheory_axioms.shtml

7)  Mike Lawler offers this follow-up take to a Keith Devlin blog piece:
http://tinyurl.com/leffaq5

8)  Popular science writer Carl Zimmer ventures into the land of statistics with a piece for Nautilus on the 'null hypothesis' (interestingly placed under the heading of, "Epistemology," and using Bigfoot as a working example):
http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/why-we-cant-rule-out-bigfoot 

9)  And for those who just like to play with crunched numbers, here's an oddball look at taxi-driver tipping in NY City:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-07/tipping-taxi-drivers-data-analysis-cant-explain-these-puzzles

10)  Lastly, not math, but I'll plug a small volume I just finished and enjoyed: "The Universe" edited by John Brockman. I assume a number of readers here, fancy, as I do, reading popular cosmology/physics books, though I find few I can wholeheartedly endorse for lay readers. This volume though is a wonderful compendium of many different thinkers ranging over a variety of topics/debates within cosmology, and very readable -- if you're familiar with the sorts of compendiums Brockman puts out, then you already know that you do or don't enjoy this sort of thing. Some of the essays are already dated a bit, but still a splendid collection, if this is an area you have some familiarity with.


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