Weekly picks

Welcome to last week’s picks!

This week, I didn’t have any time to read any blogs, spending my time at the Young Set Theory Workshop 2011. Upon my return to the US, I was facing some daunting statistics: 345 posts had accumulated that week. As horrifying as it may sound to go through that amount of posts for the weekly picks, it is also simply impressive to see so much mathematical blogging in just one week. But let’s get to it!

On Monday, you enjoyed Peter Cameron’s post on ambiguity, part of an exchange with JoAnne Growney after which Journey into Randomness introduced you to curvature for Markov chains (only the researchblogging snippet is missing). Come Tuesday, Doug Corey’s guest post at Frank Morgan’s blog taught you how to calculate the speed of light in water using just a laser pointer and a cup of water while Division by Zero gave you an amazing piece about Albrecht Dürer’s instructional geometry book for painters.

On Wednesday, among all the posts on the topic last week, you just had to read (and watched) Tim Gowers’s account of how he approached his task of giving an informal introduction to the work of this year’s Abel Prize winner John Milnor; later that day you followed Math Frolic’s link and read up on mathematical stereotypes in children and regained a little bit of hope after reading a personal account of the NSF’s outreach to K-12 students at the AMS grad student blog.

On Thursday, you decided to go back a day and follow Nuit Blanche’s ongoing series on multiplicative noise effect from the beginning. But towards the end of the week, mathematical bloggers relaxed and you found those great posts that go beyond mathematical research: Friday, Mr Honner pointed you to an awesome talk about the mathematics of juggling, Saturday, Andrew Gelman wrote a short post with a most important post scriptum and Sunday morning Multiplication by Infinity gave you a wonderful reason to read an old article in The Atlantic on Gell-Mann and Feynman.

And the best thing still is: all of these posts will be around, so relax, get a cup of coffee and take your time to catch up on some mathematical blogging.

PS: For more transparency, we’ll be posting with personal wordpress accounts from now on 🙂