Friday, January 26, 2018

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”:

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:
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?’:

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:
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:


…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:



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