A Big Serving of Monday Potpourri

Catching up on a few things:

1) First, Keith Devlin continues his fascinating series on his MOOC experience (now 6 recent posts to catch up on in his latest series, if you haven't been following along):

http://mooctalk.org/

2) And if you missed Keith delightfully talking on NPR this weekend about the excitement generated by Yitang Zhang's attack on the Twin-prime conjecture earlier this year, give that a listen here:

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/21/256003488/and-the-number-of-the-year-is-the-lowly-2?ft=1&f=1007

3) Meanwhile, Peter Woit writes about the incredible difficulty involved in verifying last year's proof from Shinichi Mochizuki of the ABC conjecture (perhaps unparalleled in the history of math):

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6514

4) And if anyone has missed it, my own latest interview with popular mathematician James Tanton is currently up at MathTango:

http://mathtango.blogspot.com/2013/12/james-tanton-making-math-accessible.html

5) Perhaps mathematicians are too shy or uncomfortable talking about their (or their colleagues') politics, but I'm still interested to hear from you, if you aren't:

http://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2013/12/are-mathematicians-liberals.html

6) And three for your mathematical entertainment:

a) Hat tip to The Aperiodical for pointing out this fun 30-min. BBC podcast on math and magic:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ls7y2

b) Just this morning, Presh Talwalkar posted a nice triangle geometry problem with both a traditional algebraic solution and a 'quickie' simpler solution available:

http://tinyurl.com/mtovhpx

c) And finally, a link that got some play on Twitter last week is this old "urban legends" of math discussion from mathoverflow.com:

http://tinyurl.com/l6gapx6
(some interesting, fun, and quite technical 'urban legends' included...)