...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, February 10, 2017

The Week That Was...



1)  One of several posts where Andrew Gelman mulls over the research of a business school professor:

2)  RSA-129 from Numberphile:

3)  RJ Lipton reports on an impressive 5-man panel discussion (including one fool ;) of P vs. NP:

4)  If you’re not too tired of hearing problems with p-values, well here’s a litany:

5)  A John Baez update on science data amidst the world of Trumpian obfuscation:

6)  Futility Closet aired the story of Ramanujan on their podcast this week:

7)  The map of mathematics via YouTube:

8)  Mircea Pitici’s “The Best Writing On Mathematics 2016” is now available:

The “Introduction” here:  http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10953.pdf

9)  The foundations of symplectic geometry from Quanta:
11)  At Math-Frolic this week I briefly looked at a physics book and yesterday reported the news of Raymond Smullyan’s death.


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

1)  The fellow behind the @TrumpDraws Twitter viral account:

2)  And ICYMI, John Cleese’s letter to the U.S. (though I think perhaps he’s overreached his power a wee bit):
https://www.ezitt.com/_cogink/cleese/

I'll depart on a more divine note from Raymond Smullyan:







1 comment:

  1. P versus NP is considered one of the great open problems of science. This consists in knowing the answer of the following question: Is P equal to NP? This incognita was first mentioned in a letter written by John Nash to the National Security Agency in 1955. Since that date, all efforts to find a proof for this huge problem have failed.
    I show a solution to that problem as follows:
    Given a number x and a set S of n positive integers, MINIMUM is the problem of deciding whether x is the minimum of S. We can easily obtain an upper bound of n comparisons: find the minimum in the set and check whether the result is equal to x. Is this the best we can do? Yes, since we can obtain a lower bound of (n - 1) comparisons for the problem of determining the minimum and another obligatory comparison for checking whether that minimum is equal to x. A representation of a set S with n positive integers is a Boolean circuit C, such that C accepts the binary representation of a bit integer i if and only if i is in S. Given a positive integer x and a Boolean circuit C, we define SUCCINCT-MINIMUM as the problem of deciding whether x is the minimum bit integer which accepts C as input. For certain kind of SUCCINCT-MINIMUM instances, the input (x, C) is exponentially more succinct than the cardinality of the set S that represents C. Since we prove that SUCCINCT-MINIMUM is at least as hard as MINIMUM in order to the cardinality of S, then we could not decide every instance of SUCCINCT-MINIMUM in polynomial time. If some instance (x, C) is not in SUCCINCT-MINIMUM, then it would exist a positive integer y such that y < x and C accepts the bit integer y. Since we can evaluate whether C accepts the bit integer y in polynomial time and we have that y is polynomially bounded by x, then we can confirm SUCCINCT-MINIMUM is in coNP. If any single coNP problem cannot be solved in polynomial time, then P is not equal to coNP. Certainly, P = NP implies P = coNP because P is closed under complement, and therefore, we can conclude P is not equal to NP.

    You could read the details in the link below...

    https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01509423/document

    ReplyDelete