A British train approaches a station. Image: Ingy the Wingy, via flickr.
I spent about a month in the UK earlier this summer, and that meant I took a lot of train trips. I love riding trains: the feeling of endless possibility I get when I look at the departure boards, the countryside rolling by, the fantastic people-watching, the two-hour de [...]
Posts tagged mathematics
The Shocking Failure of British Rail ...
A British train approaches a station. Image: Ingy the Wingy, via flickr.
I spent about a month in the UK earlier this summer, and that meant I took a lot of train trips. I love riding trains: the feeling of endless possibility I get when I look at the departure boards, the countryside rolling by, the fantastic people-watching, the two-hour de [...]
Really Big Numbers (Book Review)
Really Big Numbers by Richard Schwartz will be published by the American Mathematical Society on July 3, 2014.
“Now and then we pluck numbers from the blur…numbers which have no names except the ones we might now give them…souvenirs from alien, unknowable worlds.”
-Really Big Numbers by Richard Evan Schwartz
Read my review of Really Big Numb [...]
The Most Mathematically Perfect Day o...
The Paley graph of order 9 is a perfect graph, making it an appropriate object of veneration and study on June 28, a perfect day. Image: David Eppstein, via Wikimedia commons.
Whether you write it 6/28 or 28/6, today is a perfect day. A perfect number is a number that is the sum of its factors besides itself, and 6 (1+2+3) and 28 (1+2+4+7+14) [...]
When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Fibo...
Mathematical origami by Andrea Hawksley.
Andrea Hawksley has a fun math blog! I wrote about it at the AMS Blog on Math Blogs. Check it out!
Fermi Estimation with Liquid Mercury ...
Stick figures jumping on Rhode Island, part of an xkcd what-if post by Randall Munroe.
The semester is over (sorry, quarter system folks, but you can get your revenge in August and September), and you just want to put your feet up and surf the Internet. Of course, there are lots of ways you might accidentally learn something while you do that [...]
Nothing is More Fun than a Hypercube ...
More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys, a sculpture by Henry Segerman and Will Segerman.
Monkeys! Mathematical groups! 4-dimensional geometry! Together at last!
This sculpture, called More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys, answers an open question: has the quaternion group ever appeared as the symmetry group of an object? Thanks to mathematician [...]
Sniffing Out Theorems
Hector the dog is probably not sniffing out theorems. Image: SaudS, via Wikimedia Commons.
Patrick Stevens is an undergraduate mathematics student at the University of Cambridge, and I’ve really been enjoying his blog recently. He’s been doing a series of posts about discovering proofs of standard real analysis theorems. He writes that the se [...]
Measure Yourself by the Standard of t...
Are you more or less of a fish than this capybara? Image: VigilancePrime, via Wikimedia Commons.
As Stephen Ornes pointed out at the beginning of the month, April is both Mathematics Awareness Month and National Poetry Month, so logically we should be reading mathematical poetry. “Unit of Measure” by Sandra Beasley is a perfect po [...]
Bad Statistics: Ignore or Call Out?
3-D pie charts are usually misleading. Image: Smallman12q, via Wikimedia Commons.
Andrew Gelman has been wondering how much time he should spend criticizing crappy research, and so am I. He wrote the post after a discussion with Jeff Leek of Simply Statistics about replication and criticism. Harsh criticism of preliminary studies could discou [...]
On Teaching Analysis
Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medalist, is teaching an analysis class this term, and fortunately for me, he’s blogging about it. Analysis IA is part of the first-year math major sequence at the University of Cambridge, and it is a rigorous approach to calculus at the undergraduate level. I am teaching a simi [...]
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