...a companion blog to "Math-Frolic," specifically for interviews, book reviews, weekly-linkfests, and longer posts or commentary than usually found at the Math-Frolic site.

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"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." ---Bertrand Russell (1907) Rob Gluck

"I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it [mathematics] consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-legged animal is an animal." ---Bertrand Russell (1957)

******************************************************************** Rob Gluck

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

A Few Potpourri Housekeeping Changes


To slightly streamline my own blogging time am making a few changes to the 'Friday Potpourri' that perhaps readers ought be apprised of (way back I originally conceived of the potpourri as a compendium of slightly off-the-beaten-track math bits, and ever since reading/enjoying David Wells’ quirky “Book of Curious and Interesting Mathematics have thought of attempting more of that):

I will no longer routinely include some of the best-known, most prolific/frequent and favorite math writers out there for the Friday listings on the assumption that readers are already following them, and it may be redundant for me to cite them on Friday if they are already well-linked to. (they will still be in my Twitter feed and sometimes in Math-Frolic posts). 

Similarly, the growing arena of videos and podcasts is beyond what I can keep up with and hope readers have by now latched onto their favorites. I continue to love 3Blue1Brown, Mathologer, Numberphile, Infinite Series, and others, but won’t automatically cite them on Fridays, since they get plenty of buzz without me piling on (I may call attention to newer/lesser-known ones that come along).

Statistics (and research methodology) is such a significant branch of math these days that I may(?) continue to cite some of Andrew Gelman’s very prolific posts, because he is so often accessible to a general audience and is one of only a handful of statisticians I follow regularly. 

And I WILL continue to cite, on Fridays, bloggers who, while well-known, are less prolific (generally posting once or less per month). I may also continue to cite pieces from Quanta Magazine which, even though now widely-cited, derive from a stable of fantastic writers, no one of whom is all that frequent (again though, if say an Erica Klarreich post comes out on Tues. and by Friday I've seen it cited innumerable times, I may assume readers here don't need me mentioning it).

All of this will allow me to spend slightly less time on the potpourri, keep it perhaps a little briefer and less redundant, focusing on interesting pieces readers may actually have missed through the week over pieces that get extensively publicized across social media.
None of these are hard-and-fast rules, but just new rough guidelines.


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