Physics and the Unconscious

For Sunday reflection, this passage from Stephon Alexander's "The Jazz of Physics":

 "I walked into his spacious office and saw Dr. [Chris] Isham relaxing on a reclining armchair with his feet up... Notes on topos theory -- incredibly complicated algebraic-type manipulations of rules on topological spaces -- decorated the board behind him, so grand, they couldn't possibly fit on A4 paper. He was smiling warmly. He wasted no time and got straight to the point. 'Why are you here?' he asked. I responded, with some nervousness in my voice, 'I want to be a good physicist.' Chris then surprised me. 'Then stop reading those physics books. You need to develop your unconscious mind; that's the wellspring of a great theoretical physicist.' As if his scientific repertoire weren't impressive enough, what I didn't know at the time was that he was both seriously spiritual and philosophical. He calmly and earnestly told me that he had trained his mind to do tedious calculations while he was dreaming. He followed that remarkable revelation with another question: 'What are your hobbies?' Dumbstruck by his feats during slumber (I just slept at night), I distractedly replied, 'I play jazz at night.' There was a pause. 'You should play more music. I sing. I find that music is an ideal activity to engage the unconscious.' Another pause. 'You see these books here?' He pointed to the complete volumes of Carl Jung's writings, the founder of analytical psychology. 'I have fifteen years of training in Jungian psychoanalysis. Read volume nine, part two, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of Self. There is a mystical side to doing physics.'"

America's Year-ahead...

Isn't this a time!
Isn't this a time!
A time to try the soul of man...
-- Pete Seeger

As the year is closing out, will again just post a list of some folks to follow on Twitter in 2018, as America's kabuki dance with demagoguery, plutocracy, and Russian puppetry continues:

Seth Abramson

Anne Applebaum

David Axelrod

Radley Balko

Carl Bernstein

Natasha Bertrand

Andy Borowitz

James Comey
David Corn
Col. Morris Davis

Howard Dean

John Dean

Keith Devlin

David Fahrenthold

Ed Frenkel

David Frum
David Galiel

David Gergen

Dan Gillmor

James Gleick

Richard Hine

Garry Kasparov

Naomi Klein

Frank Mankiewicz

Jane Mayer
Evan McMullin

Andrea Mitchell

Bill Moyers

John Nichols

Evan Osnos

John Allen Paulos

Catherine Rampell

Miles Reed

Robert Reich
Joy Reid

Jim Roberts

Jay Rosen

Adam Schiff
John Schindler

The Hill

Laurence Tribe

Elizabeth Warren
...ohhh, and Tom Toles

Looking Back...

Today just a space-filling retrospective of a few of my favorite simple posts (from the two blogs) in the year gone by (though only a few actually contain math!). In no special order:

didn't do a lot of puzzles this year, but here were a couple of quick ones:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/04/multiplying-it-out.html  

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/01/puzzle-goin-fishin.html     

a little math regarding primes:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/04/no-largest-prime-gap.html 

a couple of lists (of websites & books):

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2017/11/thanksgiving-approaches.html 

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-case-im-banished-to-gulag.html

and some commentaries, by me (rant) and by Eric Weinstein (video):

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2017/11/tidings-of.html  

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/01/eric-weinstein-in-discussion-with-dave.html

For whatever reason, the most popular (most hits) "Sunday reflection" was this one from Stanislas Dehaene:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/02/number-sense.html

My personal favorite reflection of the year may go all the way back to January 1 with Keith Devlin:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-linguistic-aspect-of-mathematics.html

I only did 2 interviews in the year gone by:

Francis Su

and 

Ed Scheinerman

I couldn’t really pick out a favorite 'Friday potpourri' post, so will instead just cite two of the longer lists from the last 12 months:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2017/03/plenty-math-potpourri-to-go-around.html

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2017/02/mathy-things-from-week.html

That's a wrap!....

The Trouble With Math

Sunday reflection...:

"The trouble with college math classes -- which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract information, and are paced in such a way as to maximize this reciprocal data-flow -- is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake. There's clearly a difference between being able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a problem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise."

-- David Foster Wallace

Elusive Conversation (brainteaser)

A mind-bender showed up on Twitter yesterday from a logic blogger. It's very similar to a puzzle that went viral a couple years back, which you may well remember (...but will likely still require some thoughtful-time to solve again). I’ve slightly adapted yesterday's Twitter version as follows:

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Alice and Bob are each given a different fraction of the form 1/n where n is a positive integer. Each of them knows their number (fraction) but does not know the other’s number (but does know they are different). Assume each participant thinks in a perfectly logical/rational manner (and understands the other individual is doing so as well), the following conversation takes place:

Me:  I gave each of you separately a different fraction of the form 1/n that you have had a chance to look at. Which of you has the larger number (fraction)?

Alice:  I don’t know.

Bob:  I don’t know either.

Alice:  I still don’t know.

Bob:  Yes, now I know who has the larger number.

Alice:  In that case, so do I, AND I know both numbers!

What numbers (fractions) were they each handed?

[yes, there is one exact, correct solution... have fun]

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I find this puzzle especially appealing because of a sort of 3-tiered evolving process it likely follows for most solvers:

1)  Upon first reading, it doesn’t seem like it will be solvable.

2)  Upon further contemplation it appears partially solvable, but seems like multiple solutions are possible.

3)  The final step needed to reach the one correct solution requires a bit of recursive thought that, once made, is both illuminating and very satisfying.

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Bob has 1/3

Alice has 1/4

see HERE

"Think Twice"

If you make math videos you can’t do much better than get a thumb’s-up recommendation from Grant Sanderson (of 3Blue1Brown). Recently, Grant recommended a youngish YouTube site called “Think Twice” that's putting up some nice, short little animated math videos. Here's one example (feel free to explore more!):

Mathematicians As Adults and Infants

From Sylvain Cappell, this Sunday reflection:

“All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.” 

Need Some Things To Read...?

I'll have a Friday potpourri tomorrow morning at MathTango, but just to make sure you have enough to read/hear ;) below are some lists I've come across recently that may be of interest:

a)  Fine list of online math resources (including free online math-related magazines) that was tweeted out this week:

http://www.theoremoftheday.org/Resources/RelatedSites.htm#magazines

b)  Sean Carroll tweeted out this long list of 300+ philosophy interviews, at least a few of which may pertain to math or mathematical thinking:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/end-times-philosophy-interviews-first-302/

c)  And a compendium here of Marcus du Sautoy’s many entertaining and varied podcasts (I don't think these were always readily available in U.S.):

https://soundcloud.com/marcusdusautoy

There once was a...

A dozen, a gross, and a score

Plus three times the square root of four

Divided by seven

Plus five times eleven

Is nine squared and not a bit more. **

For this supposedly celebratory time of year it’s been a pretty depressing month of news and politics (…on top of the entire last year of infamy), so just turning today to some light-hearted links with math limericks (I’ve referenced these before, but there are some good ones worth re-visiting, and the one above is classic):

http://www.trottermath.net/humor/limricks.html

…and these from Ben Orlin, who would probably be the head-writer for Saturday Night Live of Math... if there was such a thing:

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/03/15/limericks-for-mathematicians/

** This limerick comes in some variations and is attributed to various authors, so I'm not sure of it's specific origin or composer.

Math and Contemplation

Sunday reflection:

"[Bertrand] Russell's analytic approach had its origins in numbers; mathematics was his first love. In his autobiography he recalled his miserable adolescence and a footpath down which he would wander on England's south coast. 'I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.'"

-- From "Wittgenstein's Poker" by David Edmonds and John Eidenow

“…it took AlphaZero only four hours to ‘learn’ chess. Sorry humans, you had a good run”

Again this week there will be no “Potpourri” over at MathTango (hope to return to it NEXT Friday), but if you want a nice varied collection of readings, the newest "Math Teachers At Play" carnival is out HERE. And I will pass along just a couple of things from last two days...

This story certainly would have been included in my potpourri had there been one:

Following in the footsteps of AlphaGo, that mastered the complex board game “Go,” the folks at Google have now come up with AlphaZero which took 4 hours to teach itself the game of chess from scratch, and then “obliterated the highest-rated chess engine” in existence (Stockfish). In a 100-game match, it won 28 games (25 times when it was playing white), had 72 draws, and ZERO losses. Remarkable! Fascinating story:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match

or: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42251535

A bit scary to contemplate our possible Google overlords… though far less scary than the current deranged overlord in the White House.

Meanwhile Andrew Gelman reports that people have lost confidence in so many of our institutions (I can't help but think this loss of confidence coincides with the ever-rising income gap that leaves large numbers feeling bitter and resentful):

http://andrewgelman.com/2017/12/07/loss-of-confidence/

General Semantics...

Bit of an offshoot today...

I recently mentioned “General Semantics” in a post over at MathTango, forgetting that a lot of folks have no familiarity with the movement that faded from its limited popularity decades ago. A few readers emailed me with either questions or comments about it, so I thought I’d try to find an introductory video that wasn’t too long or too old-and-grainy expounding on General Semantics. I haven’t found one that in a brief, entertaining way covers the contents of GS, but this 6-minute one does offer a non-detailed overview:

...and this 10-minute effort gets into a few more specifics, while relating some ideas of Alfred Korzybski (the founder of General Semantics) to mathematical thinking and language:

[...I will add though that, unlike the presenter above (Corey Anton), I DON'T recommend that people try to read Korzybski's difficult-to-digest old anti-Aristotelian tome "Science and Sanity," but instead go with a more popularized, but still old, version of GS (if you can even find one) from S.I. Hayakawa, Stuart Chase, Wendell Johnson, or Irving Lee.]

[...on a different side-note, for any readers who may contemplate emailing me Martin Gardner's old critical commentary on General Semantics, yes, I'm well familiar with it, and consider it one of the worst errors/judgments he made in his long writing/skeptical career (with that said, he was primarily critical of Korzybski, less so of the popularizers who followed). I once mentioned to a Gardner specialist my upset with Martin's criticism of GS, and he in turn noted that almost every fan (like myself) of Gardner, has some one thing on which they deeply disagree with Gardner... problem is, it's a different 'thing' for each one of those fans. ;) ]

Some Twitter Trivia... plus Futility Closet

I only follow 250 accounts on my Twitter feed… a relatively small, but manageable number: Dunbar’s number +100  ;) 

Recently, having too much free time on-hand, I noticed that of those 250 I follow, 122 of them follow Evelyn Lamb — Twitter gives statistics on how many of the people that you follow, also follow any other given account you follow. I was actually surprised that more of the 250 didn’t follow Dr. Lamb (might’ve guessed it would be closer to 200), so then decided to check out how other Twitterers stacked up — who among people I follow are most followed by others that I follow (...follow me? ;) — a tree or group diagram of all the myriad connections might actually be interesting, but then I don’t have THAT much free time on-hand!

Anyway, the top 10 individuals (I’ve removed groups, magazines, news outlets, etc.), with the numbers of accounts (out of the 250 I follow), that follow them are below; in parentheses I’ve added the TOTAL number of followers (for some highly-variable further context) each of these accounts had at the time I looked:

@StevenStrogatz       155          (36,100 total followers)

@EvelynJLamb          122            (7,433)

@DivByZero               121          (10,500)

(Dave Richeson)
@JohnAllenPaulos     118          (26,900)

@MrHonner                116          (11,100)

@AlexBellos               114          (24,100)

@RepublicOfMath      113          (69,400)

(Gary Davis)

@CutTheKnotMath     109          (15,900)

(Alexander Bogomolny)

@JamesTanton           109          (11,600)

@ProfKeithDevlin        106          (12,400)

All of which doesn't mean much; just idly interesting to me to see the interaction between people I follow — i.e., who do people I follow, follow. Among individuals, only Dr. Strogatz is followed by over half (62%) of those I follow. (On-the-other-hand, he’s followed, overall, by 5 times more accounts than Dr. Lamb who edges into second place in my group, despite having the lowest total number of followers.)

Anyway, other folks might find it interesting to keep an eye on their “followers you know” numbers.

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...And for something more fascinating and different, this morning’s new Futility Closet podcast tells the incredible story (I’d never heard before) of Marvin Hewitt, a 20th century American imposter who taught physics, math, and engineering in various academic venues:

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/12/04/podcast-episode-180-academic-impostor/

Mathematical Technique

Sunday reflection from G.H. Hardy:

“Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.” 

A Staggering Concept...

Again, won't be doing a Friday potpourri (over at MathTango this week; not sure if I'll get back to them before Xmas), but will pass along this tweet from the week that I enjoyed, along with it's lengthy comment thread:

https://twitter.com/EricJorgenson/status/935904398894620674

Andrew Wiles in Conversation

I haven't had a chance to view this myself, but figure a conversation with Andrew Wiles must be good enough to pass along immediately:
https://livestream.com/oxuni/wiles/videos/166535802



Meanwhile, over at MathTango I'm in a bit of a Bah Humbuggery mood today:
https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2017/11/tidings-of.html

To Toss or Not to Toss

The paradox known as Buridan’s Bridge:

Bridge Gatekeeper to the approaching passerby: “If the next sentence you utter is true I will permit you to cross. But if you speak falsely, I will throw you into the water."

Passerby: “You shall throw me into the water.”

Sean Carroll Expounds...

Very nice, recent 1-hour summary of modern physics thought (at least one physicist's interpretation) from Sean Carroll (if you've not heard Sean cover this material before this is a great presentation):

A Little Self-referential Humor

for Sunday reflection... just an old, classic joke:

“There are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at mathematics and those who aren’t.”

[...also, a new post over at MathTango today in honor of Thanksgiving approaching.]

The Literature of Ed Witten

This Eric Weinstein tweet from a week ago, and the comments that follow, can entertain you for awhille:
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/928296366853328896

Playing Games

From the inimitable John Conway:

“You get surreal numbers by playing games. I used to feel guilty in Cambridge that I spent all day playing games, while I was supposed to be doing mathematics. Then, when I discovered surreal numbers, I realized that playing games IS mathematics.”

Two For One...

Nice explanation today of Banach-Tarski here:
https://infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/double-for-nothing-the-banach-tarski-paradox/

Happy Birthday Carl

It’s Carl Sagan’s birthday today; an apt time to re-read some of his words and view classic video:

    “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

    “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in     
    our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” 

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly
anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

    “The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not  
    that there's something new in our way of thinking -- it's that credulous and confused  
    thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.”

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

In memory...

Perception of Streaks

H/T to Dan Goldstein (on Twitter) for pointing out an Interesting plotting of (likely and VERY likely) “streak” probabilities:

http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2017/10/25/long-need-flip-coin-see-streak/

The author looks mostly at "coin-tossing"-like scenarios, but notes such analysis potentially relates back to other theoretical discussions (such as "hot hand" observations). One can imagine a lot of other ways to play with similar data (and the author presents R code for doing such).

Twitter Quirkiness

Just a quirky episode from the other day... below is a verbatim copy of a tweet that someone posted (I've taken their name off) which I read quickly, thought was kind of fun, and re-tweeted to my followers, giving no more consideration.  If you've not already seen it, take a quick look, and then scroll further below for the little follow-up:

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the non-commutativity of custard, according to @DrEugeniaCheng. i'm going to have to try this. so weirddd  

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A smidgen interesting I thought, but did you catch the error? (and no, I don't mean the spelling of the word "weird" which was clearly deliberate)... because it slid right by me, despite being rather obvious! And it interests me because of the way language and words function cognitively (psycholinguistics, including speech processing, was my primary focus decades ago).

So, in case, like me, you didn't notice it, the graphic example shown above is one of associativity, and is clearly labelled as such. Yet the poster's description calls it an example of "non-commutativity" (which of course it is NOT).

I simply found interesting the tendency (on my part anyway) to be so drawn to the graphic as to read right through the clear, posted words and not have them accurately register -- you think you know what they say, but the precise meaning may be translated in one's mind quite otherwise, overridden by expectation or the simple speed of processing (part of it too I think is just the mental 'appeal to authority,' resulting from invoking Eugenia Cheng's name, even though she is NOT the one who makes the error). It's almost like an optical illusion that you "see" one way, but is really another -- here, a word takes on an illusory effect.

Anyway, this may be of interest to no one else; I'm just eternally intrigued/concerned by how language plays with our minds (and often in far more deleterious ways!).

p.s.: Brian Hayes was the one who first pointed out the error above to me, and the author of the post apparently heard from several other folks as well; so to many, the mistake no doubt jumped right out.

In any event, I'm in the mood for some custard. :)

Eric Weinstein on Math and Modern Physics Theory

10 interesting/skeptical minutes with Eric Weinstein on progress (or lack thereof) in modern physics:

The Dismal Science

Sunday reflection:

To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. 
...This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. 

-- Thomas Piketty

Keeping It Short

One of the shortest Sunday reflections ever, courtesy of Paul Erdös:

"If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is."

The Universe... Even or Odd

I should be writing a blurb about the various 2017 mathy books that have passed my way the last few months, but instead the volume I just finished reading is an older classic, Roy Sorensen’s 2003 A Brief History of the Paradox. Toward the end comes a ‘paradox’ (perhaps known by some as 'the odd universe' paradox) I was unfamiliar with and frankly don’t quite understand, though it doesn't appear too difficult. Am passing it along because some of you may find it interesting (…or be able to explain it better to me!).

Verbatim from the book (I’ve bolded a few bits that I especially have difficulty following):

“Meanwhile, Nelson Goodman kept sharpening the knife of nominalism. In 1951 he published The Structure of Appearances. This book contains a logic of parts and wholes. Goodman denies that there are sets. Instead, there are fusions built up from smaller things. Unlike a set, a fusion has a position in space and time. You can touch a fusion. I’m a fusion. So are you. Goodman’s ‘calculus of individuals’ says that there are only finitely many atomic individuals and that any combination of atoms is an individual. Objects do not need to have all their parts connected, for instance, Alaska and Hawaii are parts of the United States of America. Goodman does not let human intuition dictate what counts as an object; he also thinks that there is the fusion of his ear and the moon. In a seminar Goodman taught at the University of Pennsylvania around 1965, John Robison pointed out that The Structure of Appearances implies an answer to ‘Is the number of individuals in the universe odd or even?’ Since there are only finitely many atoms and each individual is identical to a combination of atoms, there are exactly as many individuals as there are combinations of atoms. If there are n atoms, there are 2n - 1 combinations of individuals. No matter which number we choose for n, 2n - 1 is an odd number. Therefore, the number of individuals in the universe is odd! The exclamation point is not for the oddness per se. Aside from those who think the universe is infinite, people agree that the universe contains either an odd number of individuals or an even number of individuals. What they find absurd is that there could be a proof that the number of individuals is odd. ‘Is the number of individuals in the universe odd or even?’ illustrates the possibility of one good answer being too many. Our expectation is that this question is unanswerable. The lone good answer confounds beliefs about what arguments can accomplish.”

Anyway, seems like an interesting thought exercise to play with.

(If you can explain it any more lucidly in the comments feel free to give it a go. The primary part I'm unclear about is, in the 2nd part that I've bolded, why does the 2nd sentence necessarily follow from the prior sentence?)

Gauss... the Rodney Dangerfield of Mathematics?

A John Golden tweet this weekend reminded me that I should check in on GaussFacts every now-and-then (…like when Trumpsky makes me want to slit my wrists, or, even more assuredly, his) for a few guffaws.

It's one of my favorite ongoing math-humor bits, but truly Gauss gets a lot more respect than Rodney ever did:

http://www.gaussfacts.com/top

or

https://twitter.com/hashtag/gaussfacts?src=hash

The Minds of Brilliant Mathematicians

A Sunday reflection from Kaja Perina in a piece on Alexander Grothendieck:

“The minds of brilliant mathematicians are of perennial fascination. But in the onrushing era of synthetic neurobiology and genomic reconfiguration, the possibility that genius and mental illness are intertwined takes on monumental significance. If scientists are eventually able to alter living brains or edit human embryos with an eye to mitigating conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, do we risk excising brilliant outliers from the gene pool? Isaac Newton, John Nash, and Alexander Grothendieck are low-frequency, high-impact minds; they advanced civilization in the domain on which they trained their high beams. It is worth turning the high beams of scientific inquiry on those same unusual minds.”

Foundations, Randomness, Free Will, the Aaronson Oracle

To end the week, another wonderful new episode from PBS's Infinite Series, this time on the foundations of mathematics:

Also, sort of cool… in the commentary after the episode the show host, Kelsey Houston-Edwards, briefly mentions the Aaronson Oracle, which I was unfamiliar with, and which interactively demonstrates the difficulty of 'randomness.' It's a program from Scott that predicts a choice (generally succeeding well-over half the time, with two possible choices) that you will make in attempting to randomly press two computer keys:

Read a little about it here:

https://github.com/elsehow/aaronson-oracle

...and then try it out here:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/

Crazy... Like A (Cunning, if Unstable, Mentally-Ill) Fox

I suspect one reason Dotard Trump was so willing to let Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka, Reince Priebus (and others) depart his Administration is because of the amount they were leaking, for their own benefit, to the press.
The crazy stories that eke out of this White House, may of course indeed reflect craziness within the West Wing, but more and more they look orchestrated and planted selectively just to see which ones end up reaching manipulated media outlets, thus signifying who is doing the ongoing leaking (which is NOT to say that there isn’t still much real craziness within the Oval Office)… all of which was hinted at by this puzzle post I did just a couple of months back:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/08/probably-not-just-coincidence.html

If, alternatively, there is no method to the madness of this White House, then we are left with just pure unstable, narcissistic sociopathy in the midst of enablers. Oy.

Fawnzie Nguyen…

Yesterday afternoon I noticed my Twitter feed popping up with accolades for Fawn Nguyen’s keynote address to the Northwest Mathematics Conference. Unfortunately, it wasn’t recorded so those of us not in attendance have missed out.

I don’t have anything special in the works for posts this week, so it seems like a good time to refer any readers who have never read it to my 2014 interview with Fawn, which has always been one of my favorite interviews here (especially since at the time I knew relatively little about her). The same insightful, funny, inspiring spirit she exhibits on stage (and in writing and in the classroom and on Twitter) comes through I think in her answers here:

https://mathtango.blogspot.com/2014/05/fawn-nguyen-passion-personified.html

Also, in the interview I asked her about her favorite own postings of all time and she referenced just one (from 2012), which if you’ve not read before, you must:

http://fawnnguyen.com/you-are-a-girl-female/

Worth noting too that Ms. Nguyen has a book on teaching math coming out in the future.

p.s.… Twitter posters yesterday kept referring to the “last line” of Fawn’s keynote (apparently very memorable and powerful!), but I don’t know what it was??? :-(
So hey, can someone tell us what that line was with maybe enough context to get a full sense of it (or will it not carry as much weight without hearing the talk preceding?). Or, maybe Fawn or someone else can post a transcript of her keynote. Puhhh-leeeeze!

The Darkness of Axioms

A little Sunday reflection from Bernhard Riemann:

“It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it.” 

Re-run...

End of another crappy week for America, democracy being dismantled day-by-day; will just re-reference a previous post from 5+ months ago…:

https://math-frolic.blogspot.com/2017/05/americas-future.html

A MacArthur Mathematician

Stanford's Emmanuel Candes was the lone mathematician to win a MacArthur Fellowship award this year:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-macarthur-genius-candes-20171010-story.html

The Art of Mathematics

Sunday thought:

“Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.” —E. T. Bell

American Tune...

Had no idea that Eva Cassidy had ever recorded Paul Simon's "American Tune"... until today:

Of Birds and Frogs

A well-known passage from Freeman Dyson today:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking... Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds."

Fuzzy Thinking

Lofti Zadeh, the “father of fuzzy logic,” died earlier this month -- yes, "fuzzy logic" had a more technical meaning long before the current White House place-holder took office ;)

One of Zadeh's students was Bart Kosko, a scientist/engineer/author whose writings I’ve enjoyed previously (if you’re not familiar with ‘fuzzy logic,’ his older book, "Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic" is an easy introduction). 

I recommended to folks on Twitter a couple days ago to listen to him on late-night “Coast To Coast” talk radio where he was appearing (a show I don’t often recommend!). Then, I myself missed most of that program, but to recompense I looked him up on YouTube to see what might be available, and found this 10-minute piece easily suitable for a lay audience: