...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.

*********************************************************************************************
"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, March 31, 2017

ICYM any of these...



1)  Natalie Wolchover with a math story most folks probably have not heard:

2)  Fawn Nguyen doing what she does best… being Fawn Nguyen:

3)  Re-visiting the “sofa problem” (h/t Cliff Pickover):

4)  Using finance to teach math in high school:

5)  Great interview & video with centenarian Richard Guy (who continues to work):

6)  I hesitate to even cite this (am so tired of the subject), but another general piece on the “hot-hand” notion in basketball. I’ve argued previously that the problem, which seems to vacillate between debunking and vindicating, is not whether it exists (YES, it does), but the ill-way it is often defined:

One might as well argue over whether or not (statistically-speaking) back pain actually exists or is just an illusion! 

7)  You’ve likely seen a lot on the Collatz conjecture, but you need to look at one more Numberphile treatment:

…meanwhile, Futility Closet posts about John Conway’s RATS sequence:

8)  P-values as “the tip of the iceberg”:

9)  If you’ve never heard of 'quasisymmetric Schur functions,' well, you have now (h/t Egan Chernoff):

10)  Since math buffs are often cryptographic buffs as well, I'll pass along this odd story of some code the FBI hasn't been able to crack in 15 years:

12)  Will end with one of my favorite quotes from the week; not mathematics, but from mathematician Jordan Ellenberg on Twitter ;) :

More
"Let's run government like a business" keeps rearing its head, like it's gonna be Google, when we all know it's actually gonna be Comcast.


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

1)  For the psycholinguistically-inclined, a fascinating, older David Mumford post 
I just ran across this week:

2)  At a time when enjoyable, uplifting stories on TV are scarce, CBS’s “60 Minutes” offered up one last weekend... the story of chess and young students in a small Mississippi town meeting success. The storyline is here; not sure how quickly the full video may be available:



No comments:

Post a Comment