What I Wrote in February 2018

I’ve started a monthly email newsletter collecting my writing, some of the things I’m reading, and a few other odds and ends. You can subscribe here.

• I reviewed From Music to Mathematics: Exploring the Connections by Gareth E. Roberts for the American Mathematical Monthly. If you can’t get behind the paywall there, you can also read the review on my blog.
• A reflection on the short story collection Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 2/7/18 is a great day to celebrate the mathematical constant e. If you missed your opportunity to celebrate in February, you can save my suggestions for Slate and the Blog on Math Blogs for July.
• I had a bit of Olympic fever this month. I wrote about the physics of figure skating for Smithsonian and rounded up some other articles about the math and physics of winter sports for the American Mathematical Society.
• Kevin Knudson and I published two new episodes of the My Favorite Theorem podcast. Tune in to learn about rational tangles from Candice Price and quadrilaterals from Patrick Honner.
• The three-dimensional special orthogonal group, nicknamed SO(3), is a cool space.
• For #womencomposerswednesday, I shared music by Florence Price, Sakari Dixon, Shirley Thompson, and Margaret Bonds. I also found a few more good places to learn about women composers: the Song of the Lark blog, the Listening to Ladies podcast, and this page devoted to viola music by women composers. It’s like it was made for me.