Arthur D. Hlavaty

Is there anything unusual about her?

2021-10-02T14:13:51Z

Just another queer woman who plays viola and Australia rules football and is helping to revolutionize advanced mathematics [Quanta]

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Alt.Poly

2020-12-02T11:20:44Z

Visual Polyhedra

Thanx to Metafilter

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Math

2020-10-12T22:29:59Z

Building the Mathematical Library of the Future [Quanta]

Thanx to andrewducker

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Ignore the title

2019-09-26T13:07:07Z

Math jokes [BuzzFeed]

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Abstraction, Beauty, Math and Applied Category Theory

2019-01-01T10:54:56Z

A quest for beauty and clear thinking. [Math is in the air]

Thanx to Metafilter

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Mine’s bigger than yours!

2018-12-23T10:12:50Z

New largest prime number discovered [NPR]

Thanx to Metafilter

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Too obvious

2018-10-09T11:09:59Z

Why Mathematicians Can’t Find the Hay in a Haystack [Nautilus]

Thanx to andrewducker

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The New New Math

2017-11-05T10:28:39Z

I am old enough to remember the New Criticism and the New Math. In fact, I grew up with the New Math, because my father was one of its perpetrators. The Old Math was endless repetitions of such tasks as adding columns of figures. But then the field was invaded by a bunch of weirdos who read Buck Rodgers stuff that told them of a bizarre future where arithmetic could be done better and faster by small, inexpensive machines. (My father was guilty as charged; that where I get it from.)

The catch was that while the Old Math could be taught by dull normals to dull normals, the New Math required the teachers to understand what they were teaching and many didn’t. We would hear that we have to learn arithmetic with bases other than 10 because that’s what computers use. (A similar fate befell reading, where bad teaching of the see-say method told many that English, like Chinese, has no smaller units than the word.)

As the postmodernists say, that was now, and this is then. There is a New New Math, with new ways to teach it badly, and of course the current fantasy that teaching can be successfully evaluated by objective tests is making it worse.

Thanx to conuly

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Fun with triangles

2017-10-02T11:33:49Z

This is the dawning of the age of Pythagoras.

Thanx to Metafilter

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8-15-17

2017-08-15T20:36:27Z

Happy Pythagorean Day!

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Springing from Springer

2017-08-07T09:28:42Z

Math editors leave the Journal-Industrial Complex for open-source.

Thanx to andrewducker

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Cushlamochree!

2017-07-22T10:24:34Z

Crockett Johnson, the cartoonist who did the Barnaby comics and Harold and the Purple Crayon, also created mathematical paintings.

Thanx to Metafilter

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Animals & paper & geometry

2017-06-30T09:35:31Z

Origami

Thanx to Tor.com.

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Chronology

2017-06-09T11:08:08Z

History of math

Thanx to andrewducker

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Enemies

2017-06-07T11:11:22Z

Mathematics vs. publicity

Thanx to andrewducker

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Yuuuge!

2017-04-25T10:01:03Z

How to make incredibly big numbers

Thanx to Metafilter

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Not boring

2016-11-28T12:11:10Z

Math and morality and more

Thanx to andrewducker

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Someone will find this incredibly useful

2016-09-21T09:29:19Z

A linkspam of mathematical yarncrafts

Thanx to firecat

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I wish I knew

2016-09-13T11:18:19Z

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

Thanx to andrewducker

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The captain’s log

2016-08-07T11:15:36Z

The 39th root of 92, and why it matters [geeky]

Thanx to andrewducker

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The hippies who saved physics

2016-07-21T09:30:11Z

Nick Herbert on Saul-Paul Sirag

Thanx to RAW Illumination.

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Not a crooked house

2015-10-20T09:42:36Z

Successful calculus-text writer builds a house based on math.

Thanx to Slate Star Codex

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Mathematics and the Pobble

2015-08-28T11:51:33Z

New book on the irreducible complexity of math.

As it happens, I was there when Greg Chaitin began the quest that led him to this book. In 1962 he was in the Science Honors Program, a Columbia University summer school computer program for bright high school kids. I had been in it three years earlier, programming an IBM 650 in machine language and eventually a seemingly magical advance called Fortran, and I returned as an unpaid lab assistant when Greg was there. One of the issues discussed in the program is the halting problem: How do we know if a program can complete in finite time? Thinking about that leads to the kind of provability problems Godel discussed, and Greg came up with an advance on Godel that I do not pretend to understand.

(Confession: Greg was a nerd, even by the standards of a program for gifted high school kids. I must admit I mocked him for being one. We all know about the guy who really wants to beat up "fags" or at least laugh at them. Same thing. I was a latent nerd in full denial, and I took it out on others.)

Thanx to andrewducker

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