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”:
2) Chris Maslanka on BBC radio about “two thousand years of puzzling”:
3) Several wonderful links from Ben Orlin:
4) ‘Making mathematics up as we go along’:
5) Interesting plus Magazine post on the math of disease transmission/infection (via work by Steven Strogatz, et.al.):
6) “The Joy of Mathematical Discovery” via AMS Blogs:
7) New from Keith Devlin on math education:
10) For a conversation that “can’t and won’t end anytime soon” (with several links):
11) Eugenia Cheng was on latest edition of BBC’s “The Life Scientific”:
12) The signal and the noise (via John Cook):
13) As if Rubik’s Cube isn’t already devilish enough, Mike Lawler shows how to make it even more Satanic:
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:
…Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):
1) Massimo Pigliucci on the string and multiverse wars in physics, and ‘Popperazism’:
…coincidentally, Sabine Hossenfelder discussing similar issues on NPR this week:
2) Caveat emptor on consumer genetic-testing:
