Tidbits...

Saturday Mathy Morsels:

1) A heads-up: Sol Lederman is expecting to interview Matthew Watkins (author of "The Mystery of the Prime Numbers") on his Sunday (or Monday) podcast… should be interesting!

2) One of the chapters in Ian Stewart's latest book (which I recently reviewed) is on the 300-year-old "three-body problem," trying to predict the complicated movement of 3 bodies that are orbiting one another in space. Well now Ian has to get busy on a rewrite... incredibly, physicists have added 13 new families of solutions to the 3 families of solutions previously known! Read all about it:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/physicists-discover-a-whopping.html

3) Again, if any readers here happen to be taking Keith Devlin's current MOOC course in 'mathematical thinking' I'd be curious to hear how that's going or overall impressions (...I realize it's early on).

4) Finally, I've seen some YouTube clips before of game theory in action, so when Steven Strogatz tweeted yesterday, "For a stunning display of game theory, watch this clip…" I wasn't expecting to be gobsmacked… BUT... I was! (…and 'stunning' is the right word):

Twist on an Old Game

Fascinating game theory ("Prisoner's Dilemma") analysis of a British game show episode here:

http://tinyurl.com/7l5tgmm

(not your usual game plan... but it worked)