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:
   *********************
Solve carefully!
     230 - 220 x 0.5 =    ?     

You probably won't believe it, but the answer is 5!
   *********************
[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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