Doron Zeilberger cast a wary glance at the social gathering habits of his fellow mathematicians. He wrote a little, gleeful diatribe about it: Opinion 104: The Shocking State of Contemporary “Mathematics”, and the Meta-Shocking Fact that Very Few People Are Shocked I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, […]
Tag: mathematicians
Mathematicians vs scientists
Gian-Carlo Rota explained, in 1997, a difference between mathematicians and scientists: To a scientist, nature is a primeval forest to be explored, rich in surprising and unpredictable fauna, endowed with mysterious laws that scientists bravely wrest from the jungle. Once discovered, the laws of nature are written up by scientists for the benefit of posterity, […]
Professional Football Player by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night
John Urschel is not your ordinary National Football League offensive lineman. He may be a professional football player by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His latest paper has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that his paper had […]
Exit strangely, mathematician
Peruse, if you will, the Rutgers catalog of mathematicians who had strange and/or colorful deaths. Kellen Myers is the keeper of same. (Thanks to investigator Ginny Lewis for bringing this to our attention.)
Lots of famous physicists (videos)
A person named William Kite has been sending us letters—lots of letters— asking that we show more pictures of what he calls “famous physics people”. For the benefit of Mr. Kite (and in truth, merely because of the historical appeal of his name), here are two videos filled with, mostly, moving pictures of famous physicists, […]
The MAFFIA mathematicians
Sensing that some things simply don’t add up, certain mathematicians have banded together to alert the public. Their web site explains: Mathematicians Against Fraudulent Financial and Investment Advice (MAFFIA) http://www.m-a-f-f-i-a.org This site was created out of growing concern with the usage of less-than-fully rigorous mathematical and statistical methodologies in the financial/investment world…. We are also […]
Mathematicians who (or that) scare him
Daniel Look [pictured here], now an assistant professor of mathematics at St. Lawrence University, once created a web page called “Mathematicians That Scare Me“. (A non-mathematician might have phrased it differently: “Mathematicians Who Scare Me”. The link is now dead, alas — was it too scary? Perhaps someone will ask Professor Look to resurrect it. […]
How certain famous mathematicians talked
“I am reminded of the austere style of his countryman Lagrange, who boasted that his Mécanique analytique contained no pictures to guide the reader; and later their compatriot Dieudonné, who in the preface to his celebrated Foundations of Modern Analysis, warns his audience that the tome will contain no such sweetmeats as pictures or diagrams, […]
Magazine: Mathematicians & Bears issue
The special Mathematicians & Bears issue (vol. 17, no. 3) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now online. It’s got lots about heads and lots about mathematicians and their problems, and about bears, and much more. The pleasing-paper version was mailed to subscribers a while ago. Click on the magazine cover (below) to […]
Mathematicians on ham sandwiches
The Ham Sandwich Theorem has been a treat and a spur to mathematicians for more than half a century. There was a bit of a kerfuffle about who invented it, but that question did get settled. The Ham Sandwich Theorem cropped up in a branch of mathematics called algebraic topology. The theorem describes a particular truth about […]