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 September 2017:
- The Public Domain Review highlights weird and wonderful old books and other media. I wrote about some of its mathematical offerings.
- The AMS Notices asked me to do an interview with them for the graduate student section. You can read the sum total of my wisdom in pdf form in the Notices or as a blog post at Roots of Unity. I talked a little bit about feeling like a failure when I was thinking about leaving academia, and coincidentally my friend from high school Thi Nguyen was recently interviewed about a similar career move she made, from research scientist to associate dean for graduate career and professional development. She had some of the same feelings I did. The interview was part of Washington University in St. Louis’s excellently named “Fail Better” series.
- As a follow-up to August’s hype about a Babylonian mathematical tablet that doesn’t actually turn the history of trigonometry on its head, I wrote a little about the joy of sex…agesimal floating-point arithmetic, the number system used by ancient Mesopotamians.
- My Favorite Theorem, the podcast I cohost with Kevin Knudson, is still going strong. This month, we talked to Jordan Ellenberg from the University of Wisconsin. He told us about his favorite theorem, Pascal’s little theorem, and the perfect cheese to pair with it.
- Math teacher Michael Pershan has problems. So many that his blog’s url is problemproblems.wordpress.com. I wrote about why I love reading his blog.
- My favorite space this month is the humble circle, which sounds so much fancier when you call it the 1-dimensional sphere.
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