I’m hijacking Katie’s newly-instituted series of posts about who to follow on Twitter with a post about who to follow on Google+.

Google+ famously has almost nobody on it. If anyone knows the potential for really interesting exceptions to the word “almost”, it’s mathematicians, so by that mad logic there should be some really interesting mathematicians on Google+. As luck has it, there are! It seems that the unconstrained nature of Google+ posts gives mathematicians the space they need to express themselves usefully.

Here are a few mathsy people you might like to encircle on Google+.

Charlotte Bouckaert

Charlotte posts several links picked up from around the web per day, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, usually interesting.

Some posts to taste: Fractal Kitties Illustrate the Endless Possibilities for Julia Sets; Petit panorama du vocabulaire mathématique; Portraits de mathématiciennes

Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers

Tao and Gowers (( or Taowers, as they’re collectively known in my mathematical/X Factor slashfic )) are quite active on Google+, as well as on their respective WordPress blogs. They can be relied upon to post about the big maths news of the day, but both are also involved in the Open Access debate and wider politicking.

Some posts to taste: On partial progress; the finite simple groups in a “periodic table”; on closed access.

Richard Green

Richard is a fairly eminent mathematician, working in algebra and combinatorics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s also way better at finding Interesting Esoterica than I will ever be, which is why I’ve included him in this list. The “about me” box on his profile serves as a pretty convincing thesis:

Some of my Google+ output is short reviews of mathematical submissions to the arXiv preprint server, and I aim to comment on things within hours of their appearance.  I’m primarily interested in the Combinatorics section, but I skim through everything in Mathematics.  Sometimes there are some unintentional gems in “General Mathematics”, which the arXiv treats as a waste disposal system.

Partly I comment on bad papers because they entertain me, but I also do it because I think even bad mathematics deserves at least some peer review.  I think the peer review system that mathematics journals use is in practice corrupt and broken, even though I do a lot of refereeing myself and I’m the former editor of a journal (Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society).

Some posts to taste: The recent paper “The Stargate Switch”; how does the Klein four group act on finite dimensional vector spaces; a page from his book; Here’s an interesting paper called “What is the smallest prime?”.

That’s it for this Friday. I’ve shared my entire mathematicians circle on Google+, in case you’re impatient to do more mathematical circling.