A mathematician named Misha Verbitsky was arrested while trying to leave his native Russia for a conference in Poland, and is now banned from leaving the country. Apparently, he had been convicted in absentia of infringing Igor Pugach’s copyright in a blog post criticising him.
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Octave (Like MATLAB but free) for Android phones and tablets
Mike Croucher works as a science and engineering applications support specialist at the University of Manchester. He asked us for help publicising a Kickstarter project to port Octave to Android, so we thought the best way to do that was to ask him to explain what it’s about himself.
AMS introduces “mobile pairing” to enable access from tablets
One of the many annoying thing about academic paywalls, leaving aside whether you think they should exist or not, is that unless you can log in with Athens or Shibboleth, you can only get access through a PC at your university or workplace. If you try to catch up on reading once you’re back at home, it’s often difficult or impossible to get access to journals and other resources your institution subscribes to. This has become a much bigger problem with the advent of the iPad, which is increasingly the device on which people do their reading, often over mobile networks.
The AMS has come up with a solution called “mobile pairing” – if you log in to their site once through your institution’s network, the device you used will then be granted the same access to journals and things like MathSciNet, no matter where you’re connecting from. It just uses browser cookies, so doesn’t require any yucky apps to be installed.
I’ve shaken my fist at my laptop’s screen many a time while trying to look up references on MathSciNet from home, so I think this is great news.
Information: AMS Mobile Pairing
Source: Peter Krautzberger on Twitter
New journals attempting to address publication bias
There is an article in the Wall Street Journal about journals that publish negative results. There is a problem with scientific research that positive results are more likely to get published than negative ones. This can lead to spurious statistical results and researchers wasting their time because a procedure or technique might appear more successful than it really is.
Math52: A Fresh Way to Teach?
‘Math52: A Fresh Way to Teach’ is a Kickstarter project currently seeking funding. The organisers offer the following promise: “Every week for a year we’ll create a short video exploring a unique application of math in everyday life.” The emphasis is on providing teachers with material to enrich their teaching. You can find out more by watching the video below and visiting the Math52 Kickstarter page.
Flat tori in three-dimensional space and convex integration
French researchers Vincent Borrelli, Saïd Jabrane, Francis Lazarus and Boris Thibert have described an isometric embedding of the flat torus in 3D space, using the convex integration theory developed by Gromov in the 1970s. That means they’ve produced a surface which is topologically a torus – it has a single hole — which preserves distances between points in the 4D flat torus. Interestingly, the tangent plane is defined everywhere — the surface is in a sense smooth — but the normal vector is not defined, so it’s also a fractal. This is impossible in higher dimensions
I’ve recorded a short video explaining in a handwavey fashion, with a few props made from things I had lying around, just what has been done.
Math/Maths 96: Permeated by Robot Noise
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Math paper retracted because it ‘contains no scientific content’; Top Majors of 2022; New Journals of Negative Results; New UK law obliges publishing of public data in open formats; Frozen primes; Follow the timeline of Alan Turing’s life; TU Munich Cancels Elsevier; Help get Octave developed for Android! (like MATLAB, but free); Open Textbook Catalog; Tony’s Maths Blog; Tika Taka Analysis; Fractal Pancakes; and more. The recording is clear but, though Samuel could hear Peter, although with a time lag, during the episode Peter increasingly couldn’t hear Samuel. Makes for fun times!
Get this episode: Math/Maths 96: Permeated by Robot Noise