A Weekend Potpourri… (including Tegmark, Riemann, JMM14)

1) Not being an educator, I often ignore tweets appearing in my math feeds which seem geared strictly for teachers, but a recent one was getting RE-tweeted so often I finally caved and had to look at the link being passed along to see what it was. Indeed it was a delightful, simple idea most any primary school could employ… check it out if you've not seen it:

https://twitter.com/wterral/status/423755360512790528/photo/1

2) Below, a quick note on the packed talk covering recent twin-prime gap work at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore, MD.:

http://blogs.ams.org/jmm2014/2014/01/17/mind-the-gap/

3) I'm currently about half-way through Max Tegmark's new book, "Our Mathematical Universe."  Probably won't do a full review of it here since a) it's far more physics than mathematics (despite the title) and b) there are already many reviews of it around, so no need to add to the cacophony of publicity (good and bad) it's receiving.  Having said that, I will say I'm immensely enjoying it as a popular science volume -- in fact, it's one of the BEST cosmology reads I've yet come across (and I've read many)… which is not an endorsement of its views but simply of its readability… as cosmology books go, I'd call it a lively romp! For a more critical look though, see multiverse-phobic ;-) Peter Woit's review here, and be sure to peruse the comments:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551

A New Scientist review below (and Dr. Tegmark has been all over the Web promoting the volume as well, just google the book's title):

http://tinyurl.com/jwdfjbv

and more quick takes here:
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html

4) Finally, a fantastic overview (in under 20 mins.) of the Riemann Hypothesis from that gregarious explainer James Grime (if anyone can make the Riemann Hypothesis fun, James can!):



That should fill your weekend for awhile.