I just noticed that one of my book reviews (a review of The Survival of a Mathematician: From Tenure Track to Emeritus, by Steven G. Krantz) is a featured review right now at MAA reviews. This was a very difficult review for me to write. There was a lot to like about the book, but…
Happy birthday!
Happy 302nd birthday Leonhard Euler! In celebration of your birthday I’ll be giving a talk (a day late) about one of your theorems. During the time it took me to write this blog post, you would have written a groundbreaking research paper. [photo from PinkCakeBox]
Freeman Dyson and a mathematical puzzle in the NY Times
On March 25 the New York Times Magazine had an article about Freeman Dyson, “The Civil Heretic.” It contains an interesting mathematical problem. At Jason, taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer…
My virtual seminar goes live
I love my job—I teach at a small, highly selective liberal arts college. It is a great place to work. But one thing I miss from my days at big research universities is the constant stream of research mathematicians who give seminars and colloquia. I am within two hours of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and…
Recommended readings (3/29/09)
IMA Public Lecture: Mathematics Making Sense of Sensors ~ Robert Ghrist, University of Pennsylvania, January 22, 2009 Fibonacci-Inspired British National Wildflower Center Free Mathematics Books ~ 254 (legal) e-books Price Drop: Stocks, Homes, Now Triple-Word Scores ~ This article contains a beautiful infographic containing the frequency of letters in the English language compared to Scrabble…
Great conference on a rainy Saturday
I brought my knot theory students to our regional meeting of the MAA today (the EPaDel section). It was one of the best EPaDel meetings I’ve attended. There were parallel talks, so it was hard to decide who to see. I decided to watch the student talks in the morning and the invited talks in…
Ambigrams
John Langdon is a typographer who has become famous for his ambigrams. An ambigrams is a word or words that has some sort of symmetry, frequently a rotational or mirror symmetry. Langdon’s work became well known after it appeared in Dan Brown’s best-selling novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Apparently Brown named…
Mythematics: a call for participation
I thought I would try a little experiement here. Recently some high profile mathematicians have been using a blog to conduct a massively collaborative mathematics project. What a brilliant idea that could be done today, with our current technology! I have nothing so grand in mind, but I thought I’d try something in the same…
Photo in Focus
Cool! I received the February/March 2009 issue of MAA Focus. I always enjoy this issue because I get to pick out people I know from among the snapshots taken at the Joint Mathematics Meeting. Each year I know more of them. It is fun. This year I was happy to see a photo of one…
Recommended readings (3/22/09)
The Four Color Problem Gets a Sharp New Hue ~ the strong perfect graph conjecture is settled: a graph with neither an odd hole nor an odd anti-hole is perfect Surfaces the Ooze of the Past ~ it was nice to find this post after writing my post on surfaces last week How to Build Your…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 