...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, October 17, 2014

Potpourri


Mathy stuff from the past week:

1)  Andrew Gelman on liberal and conservative statistics:
http://andrewgelman.com/2014/10/10/conservative-liberal-comes-statistics/

and here, Gelman discusses the "statistical crisis in science" in latest edition of American Scientist:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16259,y.2014,no.6,content.true,page.5,css.print/issue.aspx

2)  A short piece on randomness (h/t Jennifer Ouellette), with some links and a video:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/is-it-always-possible-to-find-order-in-chaos

3)  A series from io9 on logic puzzles:
http://io9.com/can-you-solve-the-worlds-other-hardest-logic-puzzle-1645422530

4)  A new Carnival of Math up here:
http://mathtuition88.com/2014/09/13/carnival-of-mathematics/

5)  An epidemiological math model attempts to predict the curve of the Ebola outbreak here:
 http://t.co/v7p94XYGy5

6)  Ben Orlin recounts the symbiotic relationship between math and science:
http://tinyurl.com/kg2zw5t

7)  Newly-posted 1994 interview with Martin Gardner from MAA this week on YouTube (wonderful!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY41_O2SAlY&feature=youtu.be

I don't usually hint ahead of time what the Sunday Reflection at Math-Frolic will be, but I will say that this coming Sunday's will be in tribute to Gardner, including the above video, in honor of the Centennial of his birth which arrives on Tues.

8)  For those interested in some more technical reads, Nuit Blanche blog offered up this list of links yesterday, worth checking out:
http://tinyurl.com/khg92vr

9)  Another biographical piece on Alexander Grothendieck:
http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name

10)  Finally, this week, will leave you with this British piece for those math students who ask, "when will I ever use this stuff?," because you just never know when math might come in handy:
http://tinyurl.com/lzvo7yk


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