I listened to Samuel Hansen’s interview with local-boy-made-good Neil deGrasse Tyson (that’s an in joke for those who have listened, so you’d better go and listen, right?). They speak about mathematics in astrophysics (“math in astrophysic”?), space exploration & research, outreach and more. In talking mathematics, Dr Tyson covers an unplanned impact of mathematics and…
IMA Bulletin Volume 1, Issue 1
IMA members receive, as part of their subscription, copies of Mathematics Today. The original IMA members’ magazine was the IMA Bulletin, first published in 1965 following the founding of the institute in 1964. In 1996 the Bulletin re-branded as Mathematics Today, though kept the numbering system, so the most recent issue I received is volume…
The Turing Digital Archive is online
The Archivist at King’s College, Cambridge has put their collection of material by and about Alan Turing online at www.turingarchive.org. This clipping of a newspaper report about Turing’s death, with annotations from his mother, is enormously sad.
A Noether Theorem for Markov Processes
• Puzzle 1. Suppose I have a box of jewels. The average value of a jewel in the box is \$10. I randomly pull one out of the box. What’s the probability that its value is at least \$100? • Puzzle 2. Suppose I have a box full of numbers—they can be arbitrary real numbers. Their average is zero,…
Perspectives of the regular solid
BibliOdyssey has posted some very old perspective drawings of polyhedra and other geometric shapes.
London Day Trip Stop 3: British Museum
Thinking I was being too obvious, particularly having just told Twitter I was in Russell Square, I tweeted a photo of the base of a pillar as a clue to my next location. I hadn’t intended this to be a stop on my trip as I’ve been before but, having had lunch by the fountain…
A Dismal Performance from the Dismal Science
Paul J. Ferraro and Laura O. Taylor ask, “Do Economists Recognize an Opportunity Cost When They See One? A Dismal Performance from the Dismal Science” One expects people with graduate training in economics to have a deeper understanding of economic processes and reasoning than people without such training. However, as others have noted over the past 25 years, modern graduate…