...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, October 6, 2017

1st Potpourri of October


Incredible as it seems, we’re now into October and Donald Trump remains President of the U.S.  Oyyy...
Anyway, some math from the week:

1)  Another brilliant math mind lost to us too soon last week, Vladimir Voevodsky at age 51:
h/t to Nalini Joshi for tweeting this fascinating 2013 Julie Rehmeyer piece on Voevodsky’s work:

2)  RJ Lipton and KW Regan pay tribute to Voevodsky and the even younger demise of Michael Cohen here:

3)  If you missed it, this math meme was making the rounds last week:
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Solve carefully!
     230 - 220 x 0.5 =    ?     

You probably won't believe it, but the answer is 5!
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[If the explanation doesn’t hit you in a few moments, look it up; shouldn’t be too hard find on Web.]

4)  A post sharing resources on the topic of ‘mathematics and music’:

5)  Evelyn Lamb’s latest “Tinyletter”:

6)  A new quite surprising paradox, “the bingo paradox”:

7)  Of Gelman’s 58 posts this week (…ok, so I exaggerate a bit) this one was probably my favorite (but only if you’re not sick of hearing about p-values, a topic he admits he’s “blogging to death”):

8)  Numberphile connects Fibonacci to Mandelbrot:

9)  Bit of an update on traveling salesman problem:

10)  H/T to Mike Lawler and Drew Lewis for calling attention to this interesting discussion (of a meme I had ignored because, as Alon Amit says, so many of these memes are trivial… but not this one):
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

11)  3Blue1Brown on neural networks (new video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

12)  and speaking of videos, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics In Maths” is a new hour-long video several folks pointed out this week:

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

1)  If you didn’t hear it, this RadioLab treatment of the ’Trolley car problem,’ may be worth a listen:

2)  The always-interesting “Best-illusion-of-the-year” contest is back for 2017:


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