...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 12, 2014

Weekend Potpourri


Some math links from the week:

1)  Evelyn Lamb interviews one of the first-ever African-American math PhDs in the country:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/09/05/mathematics-live-evelyn-boyd-granville/

2)  Folding pizza… and Gauss:
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/curvature-and-strength-empzeal/

3)  Interesting thoughts from a one-time math-phobe:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/09/05/how-to-excel-in-stem-math-and-science

4)  Some Common Core Common Sense:
http://www.mathforgrownups.com/common-core-common-sense-the-series/

5)  Word choice in STEM fields (at least somewhat more interesting than I was expecting):
http://tinyurl.com/pq2pteh

6)  Fawn Nguyen is resurrecting her mathtalks site:
http://fawnnguyen.com/mathtalks-net/

7)  Is homotopy theory a new foundation for mathematics:
https://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/09/new-foundation-mathematics

8)  I love quirky stories about the genius of great mathematicians. Here's a quickie that John Golden passed along this week that I'd not heard before (about John von Neumann):
http://curiosamathematica.tumblr.com/post/96957528974/there-was-a-seminar-for-advanced-students-in

9)   A snarky problem from Futility Closet this week:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/09/08/wheres-the-father/

10)  Here's a bit of a mind-stretcher from R.J. Lipton taking on a challenge from Freeman Dyson:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/a-challenge-from-dyson/

11)  Terry Tao offers some simple statistical/paradox discussion here (h/t to Nalini Joshi for this):
https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12ewdbivreculcqh04cdvvwas3egfs4dhs

12)  If you want a little philosophy with your weekend coffee, try this from Nautilus ("Angst and the Empty Set"):
http://m.nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/angst-and-the-empty-set

13)  Lastly, just two days ago I took a look at a couple of math history books here:
http://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/09/so-you-want-some-math-history.html









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