...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, September 5, 2014

Friday Grab-bag


This week's mathy selections:

1)  Been wantin' to catch up on your Babylonian math history? …well, Evelyn Lamb is right there for ya:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/08/31/look-ma-no-zero/

2)  One of my favorites, James Grime, opened a brand-spanking new website recently (good stuff):
http://www.jamesgrime.com/

3)  Math, logic, Buddhism, and more from interview with Chris Mortensen here:
http://tinyurl.com/pdmnlp9

4)  Interesting guest post on Mathbabe this week from someone who is, ahem, a generation older than Mathbabe:
http://mathbabe.org/2014/09/03/guest-post-bring-back-the-slide-rule/

5)  Mathematics and gerrymandering:
http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fc-2014-08
(h/t to Steven Sltrogatz for this one)

6)  Statistician Andrew Gelman takes both Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman to task:
http://tinyurl.com/mcq2wa2

7)  Mark Chu-Carroll finishes up his series on Gödel Incompleteness here:
http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2014/09/03/godel-part-4-the-payoff/

8) Back to "Mathbabe" who recounts the noisiness of student evaluations here:
http://mathbabe.org/2014/09/04/student-evaluations-very-noisy-data/

9)  I'm not sure that "sampling error" gets discussed enough, but here's a start:
http://learnandteachstatistics.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/sampling-and-non-sampling-error/

10)  Finally, probably worth noting (for any science-buff who's been living under a rock the past week) that xkcd's proprietor Randall Munroe's new book, "What If?" is now out and getting fab reviews:
http://tinyurl.com/ohkuakh

(and be sure to check out the blog "meme" I've casually pitched out to all math bloggers over at Math-Frolic...)


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