...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, May 6, 2016

The Weekly Look Back



ICYM some of these:

1)
  A brief look at the music-mathematics connection:
http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2016/04/why-are-so-many-mathematicians-also-musicians/

2)  Per usual, a lovely post from Evelyn Lamb, this time inspired by prime numbers:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/what-the-prime-number-tweetbot-taught-me-about-infinite-sums/

3)  Timothy Gowers talks about the new journal, "Discrete Analysis," he is launching:
http://tinyurl.com/gqkwa2j

4)  Scott Aaronson happily reviews the new Ramanujan film (...and has ideas for future films):
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2707

5)  Bill Gasarch reports a bit more on the last Gathering For Gardner:
http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2016/05/some-more-bits-from-gathering-for.html

6)  A wonderful NY Times profile of Dr. Eugenia Cheng via Natalie Angier:
http://tinyurl.com/zlma2aa

7)  James Grime ("Numberphile") on the "pattern" in the last digits of primes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVvfY_lFUZ8

8)  Keith Devlin continues his lucid discussion of algebra education (feel free to forward this link to Andrew Hacker ;-):
http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/

9)  One story getting a lot of play this week has to do with the illegality (due to "the Digital Millennium Copyright Act") of possessing or disseminating certain prime numbers:
http://tinyurl.com/jmxlw5q

10)  Alex Bellos reports on Adam Kucharski's recent popular book on gambling:
http://tinyurl.com/gvaqen5

11)  Quick look at an fMRI study of any linkage between mathematics and language:
https://plus.maths.org/content/no-need-words

12)  Andrew Gelman on the null hypothesis and "a random number generator":
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/05/05/null-hypothesis-a-specific-random-number-generator/

13)  Wow! combining the Collatz conjecture with the 'trolley problem' ;-) (h/t to Cliff Pickover):
http://tinyurl.com/gugkkpu


Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):

1)  Physics-gadfly Jim Baggott finally reports on the "Why Trust A Theory" conference that took place late last year:
http://www.jimbaggott.com/articles/status-anxiety-all-theories-are-not-the-same/

2)  If you're a David Attenborough fan then Ed Yong's homage to the great communicator/naturalist, on the eve of his 90th birthday, is a must read:

http://tinyurl.com/hqz4r2v

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