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.
This is what I wrote in July 2017:
- Mathematics in the Eye of the Beholder. Want to look at some math pictures? Of course you do! Here are some photo-driven math blogs to follow.
- Solving a Rubik’s cube, whether the classic 3×3×3 kind, or a larger n×n×n variety, has a polynomial-time algorithm, but figuring out whether you can solve one in a given number of steps (and therefore determining the optimal solution of a given cube) is NP-hard, so as of yet, there is no known way to solve it quickly. I wrote about that result for New Scientist.
- The biggest math news of the month was the death of Maryam Mirzakhani, prominent mathematician and first woman to win the prestigious Fields medal, at age 40. I wrote about her for Scientific American.
- Some of Mirzakhani’s work was on billiards on polynomial tables and flows on high-genus surfaces. I wrote two posts about how those two topics are related: How to Unfold a Pool Table and A Few of My Favorite Spaces: A 6-Holed Torus.
- If you’re giving a presentation or making a poster for a conference, maybe you’d like to check out some tips for how to do that good.
- The show notes for the first two episodes of My Favorite Theorem are online on my blog. Episode 0: Your Hosts’ Favorite Theorems. Episode 1: Amie Wilkinson’s Favorite Theorem.
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