Blowing Out Candles

Today is MathTango’s 5-year anniversary (...will wonders never cease!); in commemoration, before blowing out the candles, I'll just link to a few of my favorite miscellaneous posts over that time (no particular order):

Tribute to David Foster Wallace:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/07/infinity-and-angst-david-foster-wallace.html  

Review of Siobhan Roberts’ “Genius At Play,” my favorite volume of 2015:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2015/07/author-at-play-siobhan-roberts-reports.html  

Interviewing Fawn Nguyen:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/05/fawn-nguyen-passion-personified.html

Anniversary of Alan Sokal’s hoax:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2016/09/20th-year-anniversary-alan-sokals-hoax.html

An old Keith Devlin volume:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2016/08/making-invisible-visible.html

On Platonism:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2013/12/of-dinosaurs-and-mathematics-and-pathos.html   

I Was Too Busy Collecting Math Stuff To Make It To Davos This Year

While Demagogue Donald dances in Davos (and Melania stays home sticking pins into her Stormy Daniels doll) I put together a deservedly delicious Friday math potpourri:

1)  Infinite Series this week on “Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=djaSbHKK5yc

2)  Chris Maslanka on BBC radio about “two thousand years of puzzling”:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pyrsz

3)  Several wonderful links from Ben Orlin:

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2018/01/22/the-twitter-logo-is-just-circles/

4)  ‘Making mathematics up as we go along’:

https://medium.com/q-e-d/the-dirty-secret-of-mathematics-we-make-it-up-as-we-go-along-e79b7a696174

5)  Interesting plus Magazine post on the math of disease transmission/infection (via work by Steven Strogatz, et.al.):

https://plus.maths.org/content/beware-spaghetti

6) “The Joy of Mathematical Discovery” via AMS Blogs:

https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2018/01/22/the-joy-of-mathematical-discovery/

7)  New from Keith Devlin on math education:

http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/01/deja-vu-all-over-again.html

8)  ...and more on education, and computation, from Robert Talbert:
http://rtalbert.org/humanizing-computation/

9)  Still on education, Robert Kaplinsky asks, ‘what do kids understand?’:

https://robertkaplinsky.com/know-kids-understand/

10)  For a conversation that “can’t and won’t end anytime soon” (with several links):

https://blogs.ams.org/phdplus/2018/01/22/we-need-to-talk/

11)  Eugenia Cheng was on latest edition of BBC’s “The Life Scientific”:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nvrcn

12)  The signal and the noise (via John Cook):

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/01/24/are-coffee-and-wine-good-for-you-or-bad-for-you/

13)  As if Rubik’s Cube isn’t already devilish enough, Mike Lawler shows how to make it even more Satanic:

https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/playing-with-satans-cube/

14)  Brian Hayes reviews a little of the recent JMM gathering in San Diego:
http://bit-player.org/2018/notes-from-jmm-2018

15)  Brand new from "Infinite Series" the "Silver Ratio":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIxvZ6jwTuA

Meanwhile, I just discovered this week that there is a specific MTBoS Twitter group for North Carolina, hashtag #MTBoSNC. I’m not a teacher myself so not of great practical relevance to me, but still interesting and makes me wonder how many other states have such state-focused groups? If you are a teacher may be worth looking into.

p.s… there’s also this worldwide MTBoS Directory available:

https://sites.google.com/site/mtbosdirectory/

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

1)  Massimo Pigliucci on the string and multiverse wars in physics, and ‘Popperazism’:

https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/peter-woit-vs-sean-carroll-string-theory-the-multiverse-and-popperazism/

…coincidentally, Sabine Hossenfelder discussing similar issues on NPR this week:

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/01/22/579666359/scientific-theory-and-the-multiverse-madness

2)  Caveat emptor on consumer genetic-testing:

https://undark.org/article/consumer-genetic-testing-privacy/

A Short Week-ending Math-Mix

A short potpourri this Friday… been a depressing week, learning that our Emperor may actually be healthy enough to continue tweeting and groping women for another decade or more…

1)  Margaret Wertheim on dimensions and reality:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-many-dimensions-are-there-and-what-do-they-do-to-reality

2)  Latest from Jim Propp:

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/on-size-death-and-dinosaurs/

3)  And new from PBS’s Infinite Series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESPT_36pUFc

4)  also new from Numberphile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3D7XYQExt0&feature=youtu.be

4)  A physicist looks at a math puzzle:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/01/pure-nerd-fun-grasshopper-problem.html

5)  Luckily, I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read Ben Orlin’s latest offering… or it would’ve ended up all over my keyboard:

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2018/01/17/math-classes-every-college-should-teach/

6)  Michael Harris pens a bit of a tease at his long quiet blog (new book, or something else?… I DON’T think they’re making a big-screen movie out of his 1st book):

https://mathematicswithoutapologies.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/unexpected-followers/

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

1)  On Twitter this week:

https://twitter.com/PhilosophyMttrs/status/952789972578390017

2)  ICYMI, the latest cover from Der SPIEGEL that says it all:

The Friday Weekly Grab-bag

While Trumpie was kept busy all week laundering money, I put together another Friday potpourri, in-between washing tie-dye T-shirts:

1)  Last week’s TED Radio Hour (on NPR) re-ran a popular entertaining excursion into numbers and math (and includes Randall Munroe):

https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/?showDate=2018-01-05

2)  Interesting take on leaving the Langlands program:

http://blog.jpolak.org/?p=1891

3)  Nice introduction to some very basic statistics concepts and uncertainty:

http://flowingdata.com/2018/01/08/visualizing-the-uncertainty-in-data/

4)  Peter Cameron on bees, Bayer, and publication:

https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/bees-replication-and-academic-publishing/

5)  Andrew Gelman on ‘randomized controlled trials’ (…as if there is such a thing):

http://andrewgelman.com/2018/01/08/benefits-limitations-randomized-controlled-trials-agree-deaton-cartwright/

6)  20+ introductory videos on statistics from the “Statistics Learning Centre”:

https://learnandteachstatistics.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/videos-for-teaching-and-learning-statistics/

7)  A listing of (mostly British) math podcasts you may enjoy:

https://mathsedideas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/on-mathematics-to-listen-to.html

8)  A tribute to John Cook upon a decade of blogging:

https://tdhopper.com/blog/ten-year-endeavor/

9)  A new episode of the “My Favorite Theorem” podcast is up:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/mohamed-omars-favorite-theorem/

10)  A little trigonometry and a problematic road intersection (h/t Adam Kucharski):
http://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/amp/

11)  Finally (because there is most certainly math involved), science journalist learns poker from scratch and wins national championship:

https://www.pokerstars.com/en/blog/tournaments/2018/pca-2018-konnikova-and-seidel-aim-for-ma-169889.shtml

…perhaps worth noting, some may want to follow along the ongoing Joint Math Meetings in San Diego through tomorrow, on Twitter or Facebook with hashtag #JMM2018

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

1)  Interesting piece, a bit ago, with philosopher Peter Unger:

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/is-modern-philosophy-just-empty-ideas-an-interview-with-peter-unger

2)  You either are or are not a Jerry Seinfeld fan… if you’re the former you’ll enjoy this audio interview with the New Yorker:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/jerry-seinfeld-gets-technical/

Potpourri getting 2018 underway

While Steve Bannon & Donny Trump were debating over just where to have a duel at 20 paces, while reverting America back to the 18th century, I was composing this week’s math potpourri:

1)  A “Journey From Frequentist to Bayesian Statistics” via Frank Harrell:

http://www.fharrell.com/2017/02/my-journey-from-frequentist-to-bayesian.html

2)  Another observation from John Baez (and commenters):

https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/R1bXyhXvnDs

3)  The latest from “Mathematics Rising” on probabilities, the brain, and perception:

http://mathrising.com/?p=1544

4)  Evelyn Lamb’s January “TinyLetter” is out with a lot of varied material:

https://tinyletter.com/evelynjlamb/letters/stuff-evelyn-wants-you-to-read-12

I’ll probably keep citing Dr. Lamb’s monthly newsletter in the “potpourris” BUT don’t rely on me; subscribe to it for your own email, if you haven’t already:

https://tinyletter.com/evelynjlamb

5)  “The Intrepid Mathematician” briefly tackles the Continuum Hypothesis:

https://anthonybonato.com/2018/01/03/the-continuum-hypothesis/

6)  A new “Carnival of Mathematics” is up here:

http://www.ganitcharcha.com/view-article-Carnival-of-Mathematics-153.html

7)  I s'pose if you wanted to impress some folks with your cognitive skills you could commit the latest-discovered prime number to memory:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/04/largest-prime-number-discovered-with-more-than-23m-digits

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

1)  2017 ended with this viral tweet & comments… that was worth the wait (I never even managed to get to the end of the comments):

https://twitter.com/FeralCrone/status/947273738151751680

2)  ...and, just a lovely way to begin a new year ...though I suspect the year may rapidly go downhill from here :(((