Potpourri is back (...after a couple weeks off)

While you were sleeping, and Aryan Anti-Christ Donald was busily colluding, obstructing, and weeping over fellow-harasser Roy Moore’s loss, I was once again hard at work pulling together another Friday math potpourri:

1)  Great New Yorker profile of Jim Simons, mathematician and billionaire hedge fund manager, and his Flatiron Institute:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the-numbers-king

2)  The latest blog “Carnival of Mathematics”:

http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/carnival-mathematics-152/

3)  A very basic post on “the importance of statistics”:

http://statisticsbyjim.com/basics/importance-statistics/

4)  Even if you’ve already read about AlphaZero’s “staggering” chess success, still worth reading John Baez’s post:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+johncbaez999/posts/Xk36jKsosGT

5)  Wonderful Patrick Honner post for Quanta Magazine explaining the marvels of pentagon tiling:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-problem-with-pentagons-20171211/

6)  A couple of new books on the way:

 “Closing the Gap” (about prime numbers), by Vicky Neale:

https://plus.maths.org/content/closing-gap

...and “The Calculus Story” by David Acheson

7)  New “Infinite Series” episode this week on encryption:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOs34_-eREk

8)  An odd geometric conjecture proved (h/t Mike Lawler):

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-mathematicians-year-old-problem.html

9)  This year's Christmas lecture (recommended by The Aperiodical) from Donald Knuth at Stanford:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQw4CdxLr8

10)  The power of graphics... Keith Devlin's latest:
https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2017/12/clash-of-representations.html

11)  For some levity, this is old, but I only ran across it this week… an Andrew Gelman lexicon:

http://andrewgelman.com/2009/05/24/handy_statistic/

…which in turn leads to these “definitions” from Stephen Senn:

http://www.senns.demon.co.uk/wdict.html

12)  Finally, not a pleasant read, but a needed reminder that this in-the-news problem is long-standing and cuts across all fields:
https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-problem-304638dc5de5

...and there is followup to Kristian's post at Gelman's blog:
http://andrewgelman.com/2017/12/14/need-stop-sacrificing-women-alter-deeply-mediocre-men-isba-edition/

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

Just a couple of Twitter threads from the week I found entertaining:

https://twitter.com/sadgirlkms/status/940006885914300416

https://twitter.com/rachsyme/status/940641484356947971