Friday, December 15, 2017

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:

2)  The latest blog “Carnival of Mathematics”:

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

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

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

6)  A couple of new books on the way:
 “Closing the Gap” (about prime numbers), by Vicky Neale:
...and “The Calculus Story” by David Acheson

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

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

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

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

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

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:





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