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/