Friday Mathy Leftovers

More weekend reading:

1)  Starting with Escher, Keith Devlin highlights the use of games and media in math education:
http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2015/12/life-inside-impossible-escher-figure.html

2)  A 'trick' chess problem from Futility Closet:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/12/04/black-and-white-184/

...and a little algebra from Futility Closet as well:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/12/08/product-recall/

3)  Jo Boaler and "la revolution" in math teaching (h/t to Egan Chernoff):
https://www.tes.com/news/tes-magazine/tes-magazine/we-need-a-revolution-how-we-think-about-maths

4)  Another odd or surprising finding from Presh Talwalkar (once again involving probability... and Santa):
http://tinyurl.com/gvowlzn

5)  Peter Woit with a bit of update/commentary about Mochizuki's ever-complex "proof" of the ABC conjecture:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8160

6)  From Quanta, a math "quartet" seeks mathematical breakthroughs:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151208-four-mathematicians/

7)   Ben Orlin offers a primer on teaching, across the years and across different levels:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/12/09/what-level-of-teaching-is-right-for-me/

8)  The mathematics of house keys... who knew!? (be sure to also read and follow the link in Mike Lawler's initial comment to the post):
http://mathbabe.org/2015/12/09/housekeys/

9)  First review I've seen of the new Euler biography from Princeton U. Press:
http://tinyurl.com/qzawl6k

10)  Futility Closet entertains yet again with some peculiar polyhedra:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/12/10/the-csaszar-polyhedron/

11)  Siobhan Roberts returns to us with another mathy piece on a conjecture of Erdös, recently solved:
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/uncategorized/new-erdos-paper-solves-egyptian-fraction-problem/

12)  Slightly technical, but an interesting statistical dissection of a biomed paper from Chris Harrow:
https://casmusings.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/how-one-data-point-destroyed-a-study/

13)  Not exactly a math lesson, but certainly an interesting lesson of some sort from Simon Gregg (h/t to Nalini Joshi for this one):
http://followinglearning.blogspot.ae/2015/12/making-sense.html


Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):
 
Often I try to close out on an up beat note, but this week instead am just dropping in this classic, old Jacob Bronowski clip once again: