...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, March 3, 2017

Plenty Math Potpourri to Go Around

No shortage of good math-related stuff around this week. Here’s a bit of it:

1)  If math is your thing, should you become a data scientist?:

2) “Are we killing students' love of math” (h/t Earl Samuelson):

3)  Constructor theory and Newcomb’s Paradox, via David Deutsch:

4)  Fun interview with Eugenia Cheng in the Guardian (including promotion of her latest book, “Beyond Infinity”):

5)  Joselle Kehoe looks at renewed interest in bootstrapping in physics:

6)  Cathy O’Neil on when less is more, with Big Data:

7)  James Tanton on “Exclusionary Math”:

8)  Mike Lawler points to “pension accounting” (and this article), as the most important public math issue by miles and miles”:

p.s... yesterday, Mike tweeted out this bit of classic math: "...which has the larger area a 13-13-24 triangle or a 13-13-10 one :)":



9)  I’ve referenced the latest poker-playing AI bots (and successes) before, and now this interesting follow-up report on these human-beating machines. Two separate algorithmic programs have now handily defeated human professionals, and might even take on each other:

10)  A little statistics/causality thinking from Dilbert:

11)  ICYMI, last weekend I chatted with Dr. Francis Su:

12)  If it's math and in Quanta, you know it'll be good! This time from Kevin Hartnett (on class numbers):

13)  Well, this looks charming (but then it had me from the very initial Cat Stevens music)! [h/t to Jim Propp for pointing it out]:



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

1)  A physicist questioning dark matter:

2)  Feel like I become a bigger fan of Brian Hayes, in some asymptotic way ;) with each new piece he writes. And now he’s off on a new writing venture:



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