...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, December 2, 2016

Weekend Reads, if you missed them...


A short list of picks from the week:

1)  A few frequently asked questions/answers from John Cook:

2)  Alex Bellos presents one of the all-time greatest, most contentious paradoxes (Newcomb’s):

3)  A newly-discovered prime number:

4)  Interesting piece on (mathematician) Jim Simon’s incredible Medallion Fund (h/t Steven Strogatz):

5)  Evelyn Lamb suggests some possible videos for generating math discussion at the secondary level:

…and in one of her more complex/weird “favorite spaces,” Dr. Lamb explains “lexicographic ordering on the unit square”:
  

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

1)  My own interests in philosophy are fairly narrow, but the five (2016) books recommended in this long post look interesting (h/t Graham Farmelo):

2)  A paper called (by it’s AUTHOR) a steaming pile of dung from start to meaningless finish” is retracted from a journal:

(folks, you can’t make this stuff up… or, maybe in a sense, you can!)



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