Mathematics Position To Pass Along

Just putting it in the hopper. Feel free to forward along, gents.

~mft

Iowahawk's Lemma

Even his mathematical wit is brilliant.

Another Non-Portuguese Get's to Plough Those Fields of Green

Heard of him before? Any of 'em? I sure hadn't. Am so beneath it might as well do a Hardy.

Herr Rott' s-komplizierter analytischer Beweis des Bin Laden-Theorems

That's what you get for bringing Dolbeault Cohomology to the Hood.

Laudatio

Good Luck, and Don't Fuck This Up For Us...

Click on the title link. Then use the magnifying glass to zoom in on the article. Such topics are:

"ALGORITHMS, MOFO! DO YOU SPEAK IT?! So how can you sum up the last 10,000 years of scientific discovery in a completely universal way? Easy: MATH. The aliens won't know who Pythagoras was, but they'll sure as shit know his theorem. The right triangle will show our alien visitors, without any doubt, that humans are scientific-minded..."

Hey Tecs! Wanna teach me those CDs?

Tell me about it.

Matematica Mord: or, When a PP Jeremiah Confronts "Feynman"

Mr. Miles' opus is Chock Full of nice Jeremiahic moments, such as:

"Einstein had said, "You know, once you start calculating (with abstract mathematics) you shit yourself up before you know it." But suddenly, in 1912, he developed a fondness for this mess. Perhaps he saw darkly what Heisenberg would see very clearly: the 20th century would have a love affair with shit. The century proved this in every field, from art to math to science to war to politics to entertainment to sex. The century loved nothing so much as watching someone foul
himself in public"

Naturally, as he's full of shit, he'll get the girl.

For Whom The Shills Poll

"7 is the most random number". Now that is a prime convergence of Fortuna da Bitch.

Leo Tolstoy on Mathematics

In 1862, Leo Tolstoy published “War and Peace,” an epic national novel of Russia that uses individual and singular moments in peace and war to explore human universals and timeless themes. So now, as I begin page 937 (out of 1,386), or Part 11, Chapter 1, I decide to bring Tolstoy’s thoughts on mathematics (circa 1862) to bear on the FCP crowd.

After the catastrophic and near pyrrhic Russian victory over Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Borodino just outside Moscov (Tolstoy has it taking place in late August 1812), Tolstoy ruminates on the eternity that is the universe, and how humans are incapable (or nearly incapable) of dealing with infinite, but are very capable in dealing with small segments of quantities in an historical or mathematical way. To connect the analogy with the battle, or with humanity: “The progress of humanity…” that is, after literally tens of thousands of Russian and French soldiers are annihilated, “…arising from an innumerable multitude of individual wills, is continuous in motion.” Thousands have died. But hundreds of thousands continue living. Humanity pushes on, and on, and on. But understanding this grand push requires one to study the singular.

And on mathematics, Tolstoy says, “By taking smaller and smaller units of motion we merely approach the solution of the problem, but we never attain it. It is only by assuming an infinitely small magnitude, and a progression rising from it up to a tenth, and taking the sum of that geometrical progression, that we can arrive at the solution of the problem. A new branch of mathematics [again, this written in 1862], dealing with infinitely small quantities, gives now in other more complex problems of dynamics solutions of problems that seemed insoluble.”

(page 937 of Tolstoy, “War and Peace,” Constance Garnett translations, Modern Library, 2002 printing.)

So feel free to use that as the opener in you next mathematical conference paper (just footnote me as your pro-bono, self-appointed historical and literary consultant).

The bill comes due

.. for Adam Ries, the author of the famous treatise, Ein Gerechent Büchlein/ auff den Schöffel/ Eimer/ vnd Pfundtgewicht, which helps "the poor common man not be cheated when buying bread."

The search for the Higgs boson

A babyish, physicky explanation, versus the real McCoy.

Four big trees

An unnecessarily complicated mathematical model

The mathematical model considers a male and a female in a courtship encounter of unspecified duration, with the game ending when one or other party quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. The model assumes that the male is either a ''good'' or a ''bad'' type from the female's point of view, according to his condition or willingness to care for the young after mating. The female gets a positive payoff from mating if the male is a ''good'' male but a negative payoff if he is ''bad'', so it is in her interest to gain information about the male's type with the aim of avoiding mating with a "bad" male. In contrast, a male gets a positive payoff from mating with any female, though his payoff is higher if he is "good" than if he is "bad". Oh, c'mon! Is this how it works? [Add a pic, per JJ's request.]

Explaining the stock market via music

Technical explanations for AA.

Study, JJ, study

Way to launch a journal

How many names can you recognize?

Summers and The Bell Curve

Arelcao Akleos said...
Well, that Summers thing is interesting. If he had said what is claimed he said, then he would have been wrong [given the evidence he alluded to]. He in fact did NOT claim that "men are more mathematically talented than women on average". What he claimed is that the consistent evidence from various testing programs shows that although the averages show no appreciable difference between the sexes [some tests go one way, others the other way, and this can change through different eras] the extremes do. In particular, these tests, no matter where in the world, and no matter what decade you look at, show that in the category of "the very best" and "the very worst" men appear much more frequently than women. If you look at those who score in the bottom 1% of IQ tests, and those who score in the top 1% of IQ tests, men rule by a ratio of at least 2:1. And as you go further out on the deviations, the ratio shoots up. If I remember correctly, the IQ test the military gave back some three decades ago, what was known then--as the "gcf" [general comprehension factor], had a ratio of nearly 8:1 men for those who scored in the top 0.1%. It had an even higher ratio for those who scored in the bottom 0.1%.
What Summers actually said was something close to this:
"It may be that we can never expect the elites in mathematically minded fields to show parity of numbers between men and women. For they draw upon the high extreme of mathematical talent, and all studies indicate that-- however different a story it is with averages-- most of those we can draw upon at the extremes, both low and high, are men".
The evidence, as any researcher worth her/his salt will admit in private, is fully behind Summers. What Summers actually said, not what the quote says he said.

Of course, the subtext of what Summers said is:
Summers: "You guys want parity between different tribal groups in the mathematicals sciences. If we judge people as individuals we cannot expect Parity between the tribes.If we judge people as members of a tribe, to achieve Parity, we leave out many of the best individuals who would otherwise be chosen. So either Harvard suffers in "Social Justice" or Harvard suffers intellectually. I think we should choose Veritas over Kumbaya"
The Harvard Mob: "Burn the Summers Pig, Kumbaya, Burn the Summers Pig, Kumbaya, Ooooh Lefty Kumbayaaaaa"

The Erdos Man contra The Feynman: 180 Degrees of Separation

From 'Crazy on Tap'
"I've noticed that a lot of the GREAT enigneers that I have worked with seemed to have NO interest in sex. No interest in straight, homo, or bi sex. None. Nothing. rachet
November 23rd, 2008 1:14am
plus the great MATHEMATICIANS, no sex (if you don't count sex in the bathroom with some axioms pinned on the wall) macbook
November 23rd, 2008 1:19am
Richard Feynman. 'nuff said. Aaron
November 23rd, 2008 1:33am
Aaron say more.
November 23rd, 2008 1:35am
Paul Erdős macbook
November 23rd, 2008 1:36am

Silver lining