Three For Thursday

A few links to pass along:

1) A simple, fun intro to statistics here for children... of ALL ages:

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/09/30/the-bear-in-the-moonlight/

2) An enthusiastic review from Marcus du Sautoy for Edward Frenkel's new book (that "seeks to lay bare the beauty of mathematics for everyone"), "Love and Math":

http://math.berkeley.edu/~frenkel/Love-and-Math-Nature.pdf

3) And a hat tip to MathMunch for this interesting video on "God's Number" (the minimum required number of moves to solve any Rubik's Cube -- which turns out, surprisingly, to be 20):

A Non-Math Friday...

Just a couple of notes tangential to math today:

First off, Peter Woit has a quick (and positive) review of the new book "Massive" by Ian Sample (on particle physics, and principally the Higgs Boson), up at his blog; worth a look:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3266

On a lighter note, I'm now reading/enjoying Martin Gardner's final book, the "Colossal Book of Wordplay," a slightly odd volume. First it is NOT "colossal," and second, although he certainly dabbled in wordplay previously, it is not what Gardner is famous for.

This smallish volume is barely 150 pages with large print and smallish pages... I'm not sure if the "colossal" in the title is merely a takeoff on his previous "Colossal Book of Mathematics," or whether the title itself is intended as some sort of ironic 'wordplay' on this quite slim volume (or possibly the volume was originally to include yet more material that was never completed due to Gardner's death earlier this year?).

Nonetheless, it is a fun, jaunty book covering a wide range of wordplay with frequent intervening bits of quirky entertainment. Possibly it could be organized a little better, at times seeming to me slightly disjointed or 'thrown together,' and I wish Gardner had gone into greater depth at times (as Douglas Hofstadter has previously done on some of this material), but for nine bucks it's worth the price of admission, if you have an interest in the quirks of language (as a lot of mathematicians, and other analytical sorts, do). My expectations for Gardner are so high that this book probably falls short of them, but were it any lesser author, I'd easily give it a thumbs-up.

The content ranges from almost juvenile or goofy entries to well-known standards, to amusements that almost any reader will find new to them. There are puzzles and palindromes, poems and anagrams, brain teasers, word games, riddles, and everything in-between. If nothing on one page strikes your fancy, something on the next page likely will.
If you love words, get this book. Think of it as Gardner's final stocking stuffer gift to us. (I haven't seen it yet in a single bookstore, and had to order it online, so not sure how widely distributed it is.)

Finally, and slightly more math related, Alex Bellos covers a recent Rubik's Cube competition here:

http://alexbellos.com/?p=1429 

And ANOTHER Proof

Image via Wikipedia

Alex Bellos has a post up about a new proof that Rubik's Cube can be solved from any starting position in 20 moves or less (known in some circles as "God's number" because it was considered so difficult to calculate that only God could know it --- there are around 43,000,000,000,000,000,000 different possible positions for Rubik's Cube, so you get some sense of the task). In the post, Bellos interviews one of the collaborators who solved the puzzle:

http://alexbellos.com/?p=1327

RuBot Performs

Rubik's-Cube-Solving Robot:





...and on the math news front, Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman has now officially turned down the million-dollar "Millenium" prize he was awarded for proving the "Poincare Conjecture" :

http://tinyurl.com/25hk4o4