A Short-ish Potpourri

Between pickleball and what passes for politics in this country I’ve been pretty distracted this week, so a short potpourri:

1)  Futility Closet posed this classic logic problem:

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/24/the-impossible-puzzle/

2)  Math and music from Marcus du Sautoy:

http://www.alphr.com/art/1007126/maths-as-an-emotional-journey-how-marcus-du-sautoy-is-using-music-to-highlight-the

3)  A(nother) guide to null hypothesis testing:

https://f1000research.com/articles/4-621/v4

4)  “Likeable primes”…:

http://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/maths-learning/2017/09/28/likeable-primes/

5)  My only post of the week touched on “fuzzy logic” with Bart Kosko HERE, and if you enjoyed that there's a much longer (2 hr.) audio piece with Kosko and Art Bell (yes, THAT Art Bell) from 2009 below (it's very good, covering a lot of interesting, interlocking topics):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB73G8OU8GY

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

1)  Fake news… we’ve only just begun (…aka, we’re screwed):

https://twitter.com/verge/status/913252952726421505

2) …and ICYMI, for any who still don’t believe in karma ;) :

A Math Mishmash To End the Week

Math to enjoy after 33 weeks of Amateur Hour in the Oval Office and on the golf course:

1)  Very brief article touching on math learning and ‘linguistic relativity’:

https://www.wort.lu/en/luxembourg/language-study-maths-may-be-easier-in-german-than-french-study-shows-59bb8e9c56202b51b13c346c

2)  “Persiflage” gets a few things off their chest:

https://galoisrepresentations.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/the-true-heirs-to-ramanujan/

3)  The September “Carnival of Mathematics” blog entry awaits you:

https://justmaths.co.uk/2017/09/17/carnival-of-mathematics-149/

4)  “Computational Complexity” takes on a “FiveThirtyEight” Riddler problem:

http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2017/09/a-problem-i-thought-was-interesting-now.html

5)  A nice listing of some math YouTube channels:

https://www.oneonepsilon.com/single-post/2017/09/10/Incredible-Mathematics-on-Youtube

6)  Blackboards instead of desks…:

https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2017/09/18/do-we-get-to-work-at-the-board-today/

7)  Tim Gowers on the recent account of two infinities found to be equal:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/two-infinities-that-are-surprisingly-equal/

…he may have been inspired in part by John Baez’s critical take here:

https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/KXnZmQZmNTy

8)  Someone named Evelyn Lamb wrote some math this week (as she’s been known to do), including this piece on the work of Michael Pershan:

https://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2017/09/19/michael-pershans-problem-problems/

…speaking of which, a new interview (covering some diverse ground) from AMS with Dr. Lamb here:

http://www.ams.org/publications/journals/notices/201709/rnoti-p1005.pdf

9)  Keith Devlin pays tribute to Jonathan Borwein:

http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-legacy-of-jonathan-borwein.html

10)  Update (Ken Ono's work) on "moonshine," groups, elliptic curves:
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-math-doughnuts-moonshine-elliptic.html

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

1)  Seems like every week now I have a favorite tweet (and followup comments), and this week it may be this one:

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/910223784464064512

2)  ICYMI, the end of Project Cassini to Saturn, as reported here:

Some Mathy Reading for the Weekend

The nation presses on through week 32 of Trumpian antics… and the math bits continue coming:

1)  Mathologer, covering a lot of ground in 15 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFwSIdLSosI&feature=youtu.be

2)  A compendium of math games (h/t Sherri Burroughs):

http://maths-resources.com/games.php

3)  Two doses of Ben Orlin in a single week (I feel like a glutton):

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/11/the-noncombustive-property-of-skulls/

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/13/literatures-greatest-opening-lines-as-written-by-mathematicians/

4)  NY Times obituary for the father of ‘fuzzy logic’ (h/t Steve Strogatz):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/science/lotfi-zadeh-father-of-mathematical-fuzzy-logic-dies-at-96.html

5)  The latest London Mathematical Society Newsletter available online here (h/t Peter Cameron):

http://newsletter.lms.ac.uk

…and latest issue of “The Variable” from the Saskatchewan Mathematics Teachers’ Society (h/t Egan Chernoff):

http://smts.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/The-Variable-2017-September-October.pdf

6)  H/T to Keith Devlin for tweeting out “please read” this March post by Tracy Zager (read the comments as well) on the interplay of math and language:

http://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathematics/Blog/“This-is-easy”_-The-little-phrase-that-causes-big-problems/

7)  Taxicab geometry via Futility Closet:

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/13/taxicab-geometry/

8)  Robert Talbert’s one-year plan for converting to flipped learning:

http://rtalbert.org/one-year-plan/

9)  An introduction, from Deborah Mayo, to Charles Peirce’s take on induction:

https://errorstatistics.com/2017/09/13/peircean-induction-and-the-error-correcting-thesis/

[p.s… for anyone deeply interested in Peirce’s work, Jon Awbrey’s blog often addresses it:

https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/category/c-s-peirce/ ]

10)  The one-and-only Jordan Ellenberg is featured this week on the “My Favorite Theorem” podcast, and he explains a linkage between Fermat's Little Theorem and Pascal's Triangle:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/jordan-ellenbergs-favorite-theorem/

11)  Brian Hayes' latest book of essays, "Foolproof, and Other Mathematical Meditations" should start showing up in bookstores any day now.

On a side note, lest anyone hasn't heard, by the time you read this, and after a 13-year journey of discovery, the Cassini spacecraft will have crashed into planet Saturn this morning, with a lot of coverage on the Web (not of the actual crash event).

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

1)  Well, this Twitter thread gave me waaay more laughs than I was expecting:

https://twitter.com/MarkHarrisNYC/status/905897399146696704

2)  For sheer entertainment, a Japanese Rube Goldberg machine on steroids:

The Math Potpourri Before the Storm

Having pressed through week 32 of Trumpian antics, the math bits continue coming:

1)  A Gödelian primer:

https://infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/how-godel-proved-maths-inherent-limitations/

2)  Evelyn Lamb on “Public Domain Math”:

http://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2017/09/06/public-domain-math/

3)  Popularity of baby names:

http://mathscinotes.com/2017/09/baby-name-frequency-ranking-using-power-query/

4)  Only a little math amongst a slew of cognitive topics brought together in this long Scott Alexander book review of “Surfing Uncertainty”:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/

5)  Peter Cameron on p-values and Bayes:

https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/p-values/

6)  Ben Orlin’s great tribute to his own colleagues (…while also making an important point about math education):

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/06/there-is-no-perfect-teacher-just-a-bunch-of-great-ones/

7)  H/T to Steve Strogatz for citing this instructive old algebraic Quora post:
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-the-positive-integer-solutions-to-frac-x-y%2Bz-%2B-frac-y-z%2Bx-%2B-frac-z-x%2By-4/answer/Alon-Amit?share=1

8)  For those who enjoy such things John Urschel is doing a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" edition TODAY at 2pm EDT.

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

1)  By now most of you have probably seen the letter left by President Obama for the incoming president before Donny Trump turned the Oval Office into a tawdry caricature of what it once was:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/03/politics/obama-trump-letter-inauguration-day/index.html

2)  For pickleball fans, a compilation of some great rallies:

[...And lastly, good luck to all of you in Irma's path in the days immediately ahead.]

First Potpourri of September

Assuming by now that you’ve dried your eyes over the loss of Sebastian Gorka from this White House after 31 despotic weeks (...Sad), I’ll pass along a few miscellaneous math reads:

1)  Steve Strogatz’s lectures on “Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos” available here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbN57C5Zdl6j_qJA-pARJnKsmROzPnO9V&app=desktop

2)  A primer on quantum computing:

http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-you-need-to-know-about-quantum-computing

3)  Journals (including math journals) ‘behaving badly’:

http://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2017/08/28/some-stories-of-journals-behaving-badly/

4)  Anthony Bonato offers a quick introduction to P vs. NP:

https://anthonybonato.com/2017/08/30/the-p-vs-np-problem/

(p.s...: for anyone who didn't hear, the recent claim to a proof has been retracted)

5)  I was writing a post about the absurdity (or at least misunderstanding) of phrases like “1 in a 100-year flood” or now “1 in a 500-year flood” — but then Maggie Koerth-Baker covered it at FiveThirtyEight (though I’d be even harsher than she about phrases where the variables can’t even be adequately catalogued or defined, let alone measured):

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-time-to-ditch-the-concept-of-100-year-floods/

6)  A new episode from the “Relatively Prime” podcast:

http://relprime.com/redistrict/

7)  Cool!... going live with "An #MTBoS Story" in front of 80 colleagues:
https://mathis3d.blogspot.com/2017/08/an-mtbostory.html

8)  Mathematical mutants and self-organization via "Mathematics Rising":
http://mathrising.com/?p=1508

9)  On Tuesday I asked about the Collatz conjecture, and am still interested in any further ‘backstory’ if anyone has something to pass along.

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/08/collatz-so-whats-history-of-it.html

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

1)  A long, wonderful read from Scott Alexander on research and IRBs:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
(...and a bunch of followup comments/stories to his post HERE.)

2)  And finally, in the category of ‘things-I-stumbled-upon-while-bopping-around-the-web-that-I’d-never-heard-of-before’ this performance on a “Chapman stick”:

p.s…: If any math communicator out there would like to be interviewed here let me know. Maybe you have a book or project to promote, or just want to further publicize a blog or website, or you just have a story you’d like to tell; whatever! Contact me at SheckyR{AT}gmail…