...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

Friday, August 5, 2016

From the Past Week...


Friday potpourri is back... for now (no telling when politics and pickleball may intervene again to postpone it):

1)  Evelyn Lamb on higher dimension sphere-packing:

...And Dr. Lamb again, explaining why the Menger Sponge is one of her "favorite spaces":

2)  Nice interview with mathematician/Ramanujan-scholar Ken Ono:

3)  Followup to Mochizuki's ABC conjecture proof:

4)  Ben Orlin and his round-faced buddies on Graham's Number:

5)  Data analysis of a disgusting political candidate:

6)  Patrick Honner continues his analysis of the NY State Regent's math examination:

7)  John Cook explains continuity, such as it is, in the real world:

8)  The great writing at Quanta never stops... Kevin Hartnett on "A Unified Theory of Randomness":

9)  Read about Miranda Cheng's amazing journey to sipping the umbral moonshine and working on string theory physics:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160804-miranda-cheng-moonshine-string-theory/

10)  Mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneering educator Seymour Papert died last weekend:

...also passing this week, Canadian mathematician Jonathan Borwein:

11)  And I got back to regular blogging at Math-Frolic this week (after 2 weeks of slacking-off) with posts via Kurt Gödel, Keith Devlin, James Maynard, and Battlebots!


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

1)  "Active surveillance" of cancer diagnoses becoming more common:

2)  More on China's cr-r-r-razy, jaw-dropping traffic-straddling bus:

...and lastly, this from Stephen King on his latest macabre subject:






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