Arthur D. Hlavaty

Is there anything unusual about her?

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 14:13:51 GMT

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

comments

Alt.Poly

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:20:44 GMT

Visual Polyhedra

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

Math

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:29:59 GMT

Building the Mathematical Library of the Future [Quanta]

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

Ignore the title

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 13:07:07 GMT

Math jokes [BuzzFeed]

comments

Abstraction, Beauty, Math and Applied Category Theory

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 10:54:56 GMT

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

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

Mine’s bigger than yours!

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 10:12:50 GMT

New largest prime number discovered [NPR]

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

Too obvious

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 11:09:59 GMT

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

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

The New New Math

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 10:28:39 GMT

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

comments

Fun with triangles

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 11:33:49 GMT

This is the dawning of the age of Pythagoras.

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

8-15-17

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 20:36:27 GMT

Happy Pythagorean Day!

comments

Springing from Springer

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 09:28:42 GMT

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

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

Cushlamochree!

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 10:24:34 GMT

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

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

Animals & paper & geometry

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 09:35:31 GMT

Origami

Thanx to Tor.com.

comments

Chronology

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 11:08:08 GMT

History of math

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

Enemies

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 11:11:22 GMT

Mathematics vs. publicity

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

Yuuuge!

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:01:03 GMT

How to make incredibly big numbers

Thanx to Metafilter

comments

Not boring

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 12:11:10 GMT

Math and morality and more

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

Someone will find this incredibly useful

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 09:29:19 GMT

A linkspam of mathematical yarncrafts

Thanx to firecat

comments

I wish I knew

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 11:18:19 GMT

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

The captain’s log

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 11:15:36 GMT

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

Thanx to andrewducker

comments

The hippies who saved physics

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:30:11 GMT

Nick Herbert on Saul-Paul Sirag

Thanx to RAW Illumination.

comments

Not a crooked house

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 09:42:36 GMT

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

Thanx to Slate Star Codex

comments

Mathematics and the Pobble

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 11:51:33 GMT

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

comments