Life Lessons From One Who Succeeded

From Edward O. Thorp's “A Man For All Markets”:

“Education has made all the difference for me. Mathematics taught me to reason logically and to understand numbers, tables, charts, and calculations as second nature. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology revealed the wonders of the world, and showed me how to build models and theories to describe and to predict. This paid off for me in both gambling and investing.

 “Education builds software for your brain. When you’re born, think of yourself as a computer with a basic operating system and not much else. Learning is like adding programs, big and small, to this computer, from drawing a face to riding a bicycle to reading to mastering calculus. You will use these programs to make your way in the world. Much of what I’ve learned came from schools and teachers. Even more valuable, I learned at an early age to teach myself. This paid off later on because there weren’t any courses in how to beat blackjack, build a computer for roulette. or launch a market-neutral hedge fund.”

[...and over at MathTango this morning I have a further look at Thorp's recent volume.]

Ben and Jim Deliver (good Wednesday stuff!)

These are both toooooooo good to hold them until the Friday potpourri, so passing them along now:

1) Ben Orlin, a bit more serious than some Wednesdays, on “the three phases of the mathematical life” (competition, mentorship, and collaboration):

https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/05/24/the-three-phases-of-the-mathematical-life/ …

2)  Jim Propp on “Math, magic, and mystery” in this 36-min. video describing math being “liberated from (physical) reality”:

A couple of pieces I think might also make good adjunct readings to Jim’s talk are this Evelyn Lamb piece from a couple years back on epsilons and deltas:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-subterfuge-of-epsilon-and-delta/

…and this old Terry Tao piece on rigor and intuition in math:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/

Cantor Weirdness

Fantastic treatment of the fractal Cantor Set and the “Devil’s Staircase” (Cantor function) from PBS’s “Infinite Series." Is it any wonder Cantor was driven to a sanatorium!:

Math Melancholy

For Sunday reflection, this from Marcus du Sautoy’s “The Great Unknown”:

“The importance of the unattained destination is illustrated by the strange reaction many mathematicians have when a great theorem is finally proved. Just as there is a sense of sadness when you finish a great novel, the closure of a mathematical quest can have its own sense of melancholy. I think we were enjoying the challenge of Fermat’s equations so much that there was a sense of depression mixed with the elation that greeted Andrew Wiles’s solution of this 350-year-old enigma.”

Happy 15th Anniversary for Stephen Wolfram

When Stephen Wolfram’s tome, “A New Kind of Science,” came out 15 years ago, I saw more critical reviews of it than positive ones, but its sheer size (~1200 pgs.) and technicality made it a very difficult volume to review adequately at all.

Now on the 15th anniversary of his opus, polymath Wolfram, who’s accomplishments are multi-fold, is out with a long post reviewing matters. PLENTY to consider and chew on here, including “computational equivalence” and the “computational universe,” machine learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence, language design, and the nature of mathematics and physics.  You’ll need to set aside some significant time to read and digest it all:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2017/05/a-new-kind-of-science-a-15-year-view/

Courtesy of Car Talk

A recent Car Talk re-run on NPR had a nice, simple-to-state mathematical puzzler I’ll pass along if you missed it:

I hand you one thousand $1 bills and 10 separate envelopes.

Your chore is to put some number of those single bills into each envelope such that if someone asks you for any whole amount of money between $1 and a $1000 you are able to hand them a set of envelopes that, added together, constitute that exact sum of money! 

How is the $1000 divided up among the 10 envelopes?

And for the answer, go to their site:

http://www.cartalk.com/puzzler/1000-1-bills-and-10-envelopes

The Saintly Erdös...

For Sunday reflection, commentary on Paul Erdös from Bruce Schechter in “My Brain Is Open”:

“To [Joel] Spencer and many other mathematicians, Erdös was a modern version of a medieval mendicant monk. Erdös is frequently called without a trace of irony, a saint. Indeed, there was something saintly in Erdös’s generosity, in his honesty and his support of the rights of the individual. But the essence of the saintliness his friends speak of was his total devotion to the mathematical pursuit of pure beauty. Erdös often said that ‘property is a nuisance.’ In fact, to Erdös all aspects of life — jobs, money, property, and intimate personal attachments — that interfered with his devotion to mathematics were a nuisance to be avoided. While few people would choose to emulate him, Erdös’s life was an example cherished by many.”

A Couple of Books I Won’t Be Reading and One I Will

Well, that’s an exaggeration, but 2 books I recently received from Princeton University Press I at least won’t be reading from cover-to-cover for different reasons:

1)  “Power Up” from Matthew Lane (subtitled, “Unlocking the mathematics in video games”), is, obviously, focused on video games; a topic that simply has never held much interest for me (beyond Pong and Space Invaders... seriously, by Pac-Man I was already bored with them) — have never quite understood their attraction! Having said that, I’ve been leafing randomly through this volume, reading miscellaneous paragraphs, and the writing is lively, engaging, and interesting -- I can see how the book will hold the attention of all the folks who are drawn to video games.  As the publicity sheet for the book says the game world is “steeped in mathematics” and I’m sure plenty will find this volume to offer a whole new level of appreciation for the gaming experience. As best I can tell, the approach is not so much to use math to explain or describe video games, as to use video games as a stepping stone to discuss interesting mathematics.

With all that said I do have a big beef with the book... Princeton U. Press's overall presentation is as usual, beautiful with a major exception: the book is entirely in an oddball (“Archer Book”) font that I find aesthetically very annoying and unappealing! (and I'm not very picky about fonts) — I suspect there is some reason, I’m unaware of, related to video games, that this font was used (feel free to explain it in the comments if you know), but I found the font very off-putting.

2)  Many are likely familiar with Adrian Banner's somewhat classic “The Calculus Lifesaver” and now Princeton is out with a similar tome, “The Probability Lifesaver” by Steven Williams of Williams College — certainly more of a textbook or adjunct text in 700+ pages than a “popular” math read. But of course probability is a very hot and fascinating topic these days, and this comprehensive treatment seems to cover plenty of topics — again, I won’t be reading it cover-to-cover, but picking out sections to read as interest directs over time.

To my eyes it looks like an excellent addition to the math shelf, but I’m no expert on the tricky area of probability (and statistics, in general, is controversial these days), so one small concern I have is that of the many publicity blurbs out for for this text, none seem to be from the many prominent recognizable names in statistics; not sure why there is a lack of endorsements from “big” names (it may mean nothing, but I have seen cases where that’s not a good sign). If statistics IS your field and you've seen this volume, feel free to weigh in on it below. Looks marvelous to my naive eyes, but what do I know!

3)  Finally, the book I am looking forward to reading, but don’t know how much mathematical content is included, is “A Man For All Markets” by and about Edward Thorp, a famous (and self-made rich) Wall Street trader AND mathematics professor. This book should be interesting as a bio, and I’m presuming there will also be interesting financial math and probability along the way as well.

If anyone is familiar with any of these 3 books feel free to comment in greater detail than I have done, below, with your own plusses or minuses.

"We Didn't Start the Fire" (as the Emperor fiddles)

Too worn down by current events for mathematics, so just more music today....
(hope to have some math book blurbs up by end of week)

“We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

No we didn’t light it

But we tried to fight it”

— Billy Joel

Wisdom Versus Quantification

This week’s Sunday reflection from Philip Tetlock’s and Dan Gardner’s “Superforecasting”:

“Numbers are fine and useful things, I would say in that alternate universe, but we must be careful not to be smitten with them. ‘Not everything that counts can be counted,’ goes a famous saying, ‘and not everything that can be counted counts.’ In this era of computers and algorithms, some social scientists have forgotten that. As the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier put it in the New York Times, ‘There are ‘metrics’ for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers.’ This naive positivism is running rampant, taking over domains it has no business being in. As Wieseltier poetically put it, ‘Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.’”

America’s Future….

"...this is for the ones who stand their ground
When the lines in the sand get deeper
When the whole world seems to be upside down
And the shots being taken get cheaper, cheaper..."
                   -- Mary Chapin Carpenter

“I’m not ready to make nice
I'm not ready to back down
I'm still mad as hell, and I don't have time
To go 'round and 'round and 'round.”

                   — The Dixie Chicks


Sans math today…. Am in a mood :( …increasingly pessimistic at the simplistic lure fascism holds for this country/world... with disastrous consequences for our children.

…sooooo, just taking a moment to thank a few of those maintaining the good fight and vigilance on Twitter:

Anne Applebaum

David Axelrod

Carl Bernstein

Andy Borowitz
David Corn
Col. Morris Davis

Keith Devlin

David Fahrenthold

Ed Frenkel

David Frum

David Gergen

James Gleick

Richard Hine

Garry Kasparov

Naomi Klein

Frank Mankiewicz

Jane Mayer
Evan McMullin

Bill Moyers

Keith Olbermann
Evan Osnos

John Allen Paulos

Catherine Rampell

Miles Reed

Robert Reich
Joy Reid

Jim Roberts

Jay Rosen

Adam Schiff
John Schindler

Laurence Tribe

Elizabeth Warren
...ohhh, and Tom Toles

THANK YOU!!…. (and of course there are many more)

(one could expect writers/journalists/politicians to stand up to Trumpism, but I highlighted three of the mathematicians also consistently doing such, because they don't have to do so... EXCEPT for feeling compelled as American citizens -- and interestingly, two of them, Keith and Ed, are naturalized, not native-born, citizens).

(…plenty of others, of course, carry on the resistance in venues other than Twitter).

Have posted the below musical bits previously, so apologies for the redundancy, but suspect I may be listening to these a lot over the next 4 years.

Two From The Weekend

Passing along a couple of things from the weekend…

1)  It’s been around for awhile, but I only learned of the UK’s Chalkface Blog this weekend (through Twitter); worth checking out:

https://thechalkfaceblog.wordpress.com

2)  Occasionally over the years, someone asks me to recommend a video series for learning calculus. Since I’m out of the teaching loop I feel hesitant or unqualified to make recommendations of some sites over others… BUT now, without hesitation, I feel free to recommend Grant Sanderson’s (3Blue1Brown) new beautifully-done series on calculus that begins here (and is still in production):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM

On Twitter, Mike Lawler writes, "The new calculus series from Grant Sanderson is so good that I basically have no words to describe it. Never seen anything comparable."

And if you wish to support Grant's brilliant work, he has a Patreon account here:

https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown

As I blurbed elsewhere this week, I can’t help but wonder if this sort of graphic presentation doesn’t represent what the eventual future of primary/secondary math education may look like in this country.