Getting Into "Shape"....

 Recently finished Jordan Ellenberg’s latest, “Shape” (plenty of reviews online), a great followup to his fantastic “How Not To Be Wrong” volume. It’s 400+ pages of “the hidden geometry” of life, but this is not your daddy’s (or necessarily even your own) geometry, rather a bit more modern and diverse take than Euclid ever provided. Anyway, great read, though possibly a tad more pedagogical than his earlier best-selling work, if only because much of the subject matter is drier or just more pedagogical in nature (Ellenberg’s writing style always enlivens it though).

With all that said, at the end of the volume Jordan lists many of the topics he wanted or considered including in the book, but in the end left out… another great, varied list of subjects (that sound to me even more interesting than the topics he did include!), so hopefully, maybe, perhaps, Jordan is now hard-at-work on a third volume!?

Jordan Ellenberg In BBC Podcast

 9 minutes of Jordan Ellenberg:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09w8sr2

More Jordan....

 In case you were wanting almost 3 more delicious hours of Jordan Ellenberg hitting on a range of topics (in conversation with Lex Fridman), you got it:

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

Markov Chains, from Free Will to Baby Names

 Jordan Ellenberg on English language and Markov chains:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-random-walk-through-the-english-language/

Jordan Ellenberg via Quanta

 From Quanta Magazine this timely portrait/interview with Jordan Ellenberg:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/jordan-ellenberg-connects-math-to-creativity-20210527/

Of Math and Cults

Sunday reflection:

“One of the most painful aspects of teaching mathematics is seeing my students damaged by the cult of the genius. That cult tells students that it’s not worth doing math unless you’re the best at math — because those special few are the only ones whose contributions really count.”

                                                                                             -- Jordan Ellenberg 

Sunday Reflection...

The domains of mathematics...

"And yet the history of mathematics is a history of aggressive territorial expansion, as mathematical techniques get broader and richer, and mathematicians find ways to address questions previously thought as outside their domain. 'A mathematical theory of probability' sounds unexceptional now, but once it would have seemed a massive overreach; math was about the certain and the true, not the random and the maybe-so! All that changed when Pascal, Bernoulli, and others found mathematical laws that governed the workings of chance. A mathematical theory of infinity? Before the work of Georg Cantor in the nineteenth century, the study of the infinite was as much theology as science; now, we understand Cantor's theory of multiple infinities, each one infinitely larger than the last, well enough to teach it to first-year math majors. (To be fair, it does kind of blow their minds.)….

"Will there be a mathematical theory of consciousness? Of society? Of aesthetics? People are trying, that's for sure, with only limited success so far. You should distrust all such claims on instinct. But you should also keep in mind that they might end up getting some important things right."

-- Jordan Ellenberg in "How Not To Be Wrong"

(My interview with Dr. Ellenberg is now up over at MathTango.)

Math As Monasticism, Math As Dynamite

Sunday morning with Jordan...

"Outsiders sometimes have an impression that mathematics consists of applying more and more powerful tools to dig deeper and deeper into the unknown, like tunnelers blasting through the rock with ever more powerful explosives. And that's one way to do it. But Grothendieck, who remade much of pure mathematics in his own image in the 1960s and '70s, had a different view: 'The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration… the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it… yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance.'
"The unknown is a stone in the sea, which obstructs our progress. We can try to pack dynamite in the crevices of rock, detonate it, and repeat until the rock breaks apart, as Buffon did with his complicated computations in calculus. Or you can take a more contemplative approach, allowing your level of understanding gradually and gently to rise, until after a time what appeared as an obstacle is overtopped by the calm water, and is gone.
"Mathematics as currently practiced is a delicate interplay between monastic contemplation and blowing stuff up with dynamite."
-- Jordan Ellenberg in "How Not To Be Wrong"

[...my review of Ellenberg's fine book is now up at MathTango.]